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My opinion: It's the Soviet engineering mentality, forged during WW2, and honed during the Cold War. From more than a few sources I've read, the Soviets basical

My opinion: It's the Soviet engineering mentality, forged during WW2, and honed during the Cold War. From more than a few sources I've read, the Soviets basically optimized their country from top to bottom to fight and win a nuclear war, and that included manufacturing equipment that was considered highly durable, and easy to repair in harsh weather conditions (up to and including post-nuclear ones). But hardware that is over-optimized for the worst-case scenario ended up highly inefficient during normal peacetime operations, hence their economy was hugely underperforming. I suspect the Soviet economy would have proven surprisingly robust in another total war .....fortunately we didn't find out.

iguy 7y ago
Yes, it seems to me that they really thought they would fight that war. At the tractor-engineering level, isn't it partly that they didn't iterate many times? What Ford was making in the 50s was not so different. But they junked the whole factory several times since then, or rather were forced to do so by competitors... it's easy to see how hard it would be to persuade even a well-meaning bureaucrat that you want to close down and replace a factory whose tractors worked just fine last year. I have read (but am not completely sure) that every factory had a second purpose ready to go, e.g. your tractor factory had the tank blueprints ready, and made sure their machines could work for both. If true this must have been another enormous incentive not to change... if your plan for switching to lighter more fuel-efficient tractors means you can't make all the tank components you were supposed to, then you aren't going to get permission.