Cameras, bicycles, furniture, you name it. The thing would right out not work or just fall apart in a few days because loose screws.
20 Y later I still have the urge to take brand new things apart just to check if everything is a-ok.
They do a good job, but you can achieve better tolerances using equipment that costs less than the first plane (and which you might be able to borrow)
Yes, a lot of designs were simply copied from western equivalents. But also a lot of designs weren't, or were actually improvements over western designs in some crucial ways(washing machines being overbuilt because repairs were unlikely, so certain components were upgraded to last longer). Soviets(and the rest of the Eastern block) had plenty of brilliant, incredibly skilled and competent engineers and designers and thinkers, and they all did the best with what they had access to. It's a topic worthy of tomes of literature.
The parent comentator has a valid point, the East usually copied good designs from the West.
Which they could improve.
Yep. The article even mentions that initial designs for some of these cameras were taken as war reparations in the aftermath of WWII. I suppose Leica might see that as theft, but it was hardly KGB espionage.
https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-raytheon-engineer-sent...
"Most Soviet camera designs were perfectly sound – it was more often that the construction itself was lacking. TOE engineers learned on the assembly line, then went back to the UK and stripped and reassembled every single camera that came into the UK."
I grew up in Poland and my dad said the exact same thing - that when he was young, if you managed to somehow buy yourself a brand new Soviet motocrycle, fresh from the factory, the very first thing you did was disassemble the whole thing to bits, lubricate, and reassemble everything at correct torques and in correct places. Then you could go and safely use it.
[0]https://kosmofoto.com/2018/12/zenit-e-russian-camera-review/