I'm reminded of the engineer's triangle here: "Good, fast, cheap. Pick two." The problem with a lot of Soviet design was that they always had to pick cheap si

I'm reminded of the engineer's triangle here: "Good, fast, cheap. Pick two." The problem with a lot of Soviet design was that they always had to pick cheap since there were often shortages of resources. Their designs were fundamentally influenced by scarcity, and it makes it difficult to make anything good, especially if you need something quickly. That doesn't excuse the fact that many designs were knockoffs and terrible in their own right, but it does explain their underlying design choices. There's an interesting book titled "Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design" that details many examples of this. The one example that always struck me was the Soviet soda machines. They could not waste previous metal on soda cans, so the soda machines came with a communal cup. You put coins in the machine for soda, and it filled the communal cup like a fountain drink. But once you were done drinking you had to return the cup to the machine and press a button to clean it out and make it ready for the next customer. This process seems ghastly and ridiculous but makes sense when resources are scarce. It was the design tradeoff the Soviets made so that soda machines would be available in the first place.