Originally Posted by MS Fowler

Hattersguy,
Your dismissal of all things Russian is quite telling, and typical of Americans. We tend to look down on everything they did. But slow down, and consider a few factors.
The T72 is not a T34; not even close--wrong war--wrong battlefield. The sloping armor of the T34 was a REVOLUTION in thinking. Every significant tank design since has copied this feature.
Are we talking design or production? The soviets had significant problems with production on many fronts. The secrecy under Stalin was intense--so intense that when Ford sent people over to assist with Tractor production in the 1930s, the soviets could not produce a map showing the locations of the raw materials needed for production. They actually told Charlie Sorensen to " ask your President" as the current American President had spent some time surveying in Russia and might actually know more than the planners in Russia. ( Story from memory, buts its in Sorensen's book, [U]My Forty Years with Ford[U]
The Russians did lack in numbers of trained engineers. Again referring to Sorensen's trip, he found that they had problems with the durability of the final worm drive. The Russians had reverse-engineered the whole tractor, but they could not reverse-engineer the heat-treating processes Ford had used on that worm drive. The Russian parts looked and fit right, but the steel was not up to the task.

As was pointed out above, the Russians had to design not only the Tank itself, but the production process--and the production process had to be geared to the available labor, and manufacturing conditions. Part of design of anything has to consider the manufacturing of it. What good would it have done for the Soviets to design a King Tiger--if they could not build it, or get it to the battle field.? What they did was produce a very innovative tank in large enough numbers to reverse the direction of the war.

Considering the handicaps under which they operated, they produced a remarkable Tank in the T34.

I own some Russian ( now Ukrainian), cameras and lenses. Most are copies of fine German cameras and optical designs, obtained as war reparations when the Soviets captured Dresden and Jena. The optical designs are excellent. The camera designs are likewise very good. They do suffer in the assembly quality. If you get a good one; you likely have a very good camera or lens. If you get a bad one, exchange it for another one. Many of the truly poorly made stuff has already been thrown out, so time acts as sort of a QC for them. The Russian-built cameras, ( as well as their East German counterparts) are certainly built to a price, and engineered down to that price. The parts--principally the gear trains-- are not as finely finished, nor built to as close a tolerance. However they work. What they lack is that mechanical"delight" found in the cameras they copied. For instance, the film advance on a Leica is a joy to operate--there is a silky feel to the mechanism, and a satisfying sound that conveys the concept that dozens of precisely manufactured, and aligned parts are acting in perfect harmony. The film advance on a similar Zorki sounds, and feels more like a coffee grinder--but it does still egt the job done ( mostly).
Wow! quite a diversion from the tank discussion----
The point is that all of us need to realize that German or American stuff is not always "better" for a particular job.
When we have that superior attitude is when we open ourselves up to nasty surprises----You are too young to remember ( so am I), but the prevailing attitude of Americans during the 1930 towards the Japanese was that they were clever little people, but not capable of anything really significant . Witness Pearl Harbor.
In the 1950s the Russians were still considered "backward". That is until we heard the " beep beep beep" of the Sputnik on the nightly news, as that little sphere circled overhead. Those "backward" Russians had launched the first artificial satellite. That was not a one shot thing--they followed that achievement with the first dog in space, the first man in space, and the first woman in space.
Another example--After the first attack on the World Trade Center, many Americans were smug--what did those silly Arabs think they were going to do with a van of explosives. Were they really so crazy as to think they could destroy the World Trade Center?

We adopt those smug and ethno-centric ideas at great peril.