The Soviets had a huge lead on Titanium fabrication. Titanium is a difficult metal to work with on almost every front: Refining it from ore into high purity sponge, converting that sponge into bars, rolls or sheets, cutting, welding and forging those sheets/bars etc.
This article has more detail of how difficult Titanium is to work:
A 1984 declassified CIA doc claims the Soviets were producing 5X the amount of Titanium as the US. In the 70s, most Titanium sponge in the US was actually bought by the Soviets. Famously, the Alfa class submarine hull was made completely from Titanium, something no US submarine has ever done.
In the comments from the Construction Physics article, it’s claimed that after the fall of communism, some mountain climbers funded their expeditions into the former USSR by bringing back titanium ice screws and selling them in the West at a markup.
There are all manner of stories about Soviet titanium and technology.
In Wide-Body: The Triumph of the 747 by Clive Irving, the story is related of how Boeing realised that the 747 would need a titanium undercarriage, which they didn’t know how to build. At the same time the Soviets were behind in the technology of flexible swept wing design. A deal was done at the Paris air show for a technology swap. Both sides very satisfied with the deal. The Jumbo jet got its undercarriage and the Soviets designed their first modern jet liner (I’m guessing the Tu-154.)
Construction of the SR-71 and A-12 aircraft used Russian sourced titanium purchased through a structure of intermediaries to disguise the end user.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, there were stories of essentially bankrupt aerospace companies making titanium shovels from now unwanted stock. (I would so love to find one of these.)
Which was problematic due to the fact that titanium tends to become brittle when chilled for long periods, such as being submersed in cold ocean water.
This is more “dead-end technology where the soviets had more stubborn persistence than the west”, but …
Wing-in-ground-effect craft, or Ekranoplanes as the soviet called them.
Essentially, correct me if I’m wrong, planes with smaller and/or stubbier wings and less engine power than normal for their size, that benefit from the extra lift from the ground effect while skimming about a dozen meters above the surface. So really only useful on a calm water surface. Perhaps because they shared two big lakes with somewhat hostile nations, Turkey on the Black Sea and Iran on the Caspian Sea, they developed some very big and potentially capable WIG craft. Most famously the experimental 550 ton “Caspian Sea Monster”, and the 400 ton “Lum”, the one airframe built was actually operational as an antip-ship-missile carrier for some years.
What I gather is both the Black Sea and Caspian Sea often get much too choppy for these craft to be practical. The transport/beach-landing Orlyonok was amphibious and had a ceiling of 3000 m, so should be more flexible re sea state. Yet only 3 out of a planned 120 was built
The wikipedia page mentions several non-soviet projects, generally much smaller and with not even a prototype made. There’s a small patrol craft Iran was supposed to have 3 squadrons of from 2012, but there’s precious few sources, mostly from 2010 and earlier.
At the time I was in the service, 1980s, a lot of the electronics in use were in the process of transitioning from fully analog, to partly analog & digital mixed together, to later fully digital.
At that time it was generally agreed that the Soviet’s mastery of electronic warfare, jamming, countermeasures, and counter-jamming all exceeded the West’s.
Some of that was better secret Soviet science and some of that was simply greater Soviet emphasis and investment. Conversely, EW in all its flavors has always been the red-headed stepchild of DoD priorities.
The advent of all digital computerized transmitters and receivers, RF memory, etc., in the 1990s really helped the West advance into the lead at a time the Soviet Union was dead and Russia was bankrupt.
Nowadays a new battlefield has been created: cyberwarfare. It’s real unclear who’d dominate the cyber environment in a shooting war, but it’s real clear which society is being politically and economically bled white by some combo of hostile governments and hostile organized crime sheltered and encouraged by hostile governments.
Soviet military aircraft were generally designed to operate from poor runways or even roads. Very few western aircraft other than the Saabs could do the same. However, this meant stronger (and this heavier) landing gear and shielded (therefore less aerodynamically ideal) air intakes. You’d think it would be cheaper to build better runways but to some degree this was a function of the climate.
The MiG-31 radar was the first planar array design and was well ahead of anything from the same era in the West. But it was gigantic and heavy because Soviet electronics tech was way behind.
If the Soviets had access to Western electronics and asphalt they might well have built much better aircraft.
This is sort of out of left field, but Soviet slide rules were pretty good. Plus, they made some interesting models and variations. I don’t know that they were as good as the very best Western slide rules, but they were much higher quality than one might expect.
There’s a whole chapter of w00-woo conspiracy theory that posits Yuri Gagarin was not the first to go into space nor orbit the Earth. Soviet space was very secretive and not generally revealed or announced until after the mission. The story goes, they lost a few Cosmonauts in their early efforts. This is supported, I guess, by a couple of HAM radio operators who asserted they heard or recorded the grisly last moments of doomed space farers.
Also in Robert A. Heinlein’s article “Pravda Means Truth!”, reprinted in Expanded Universe.
He writes about hearing of a Soviet man in orbit from a bunch of Red Army cadets that was, later that day, disclaimed by the official news media. Why the cadets would happen to have the truth of the matter is not really explained by him.
Yes and no, only because they (and the Chinese) are practically the only manufacturer remaining. Mostly for desirable signal and power output tubes. The American and European used and NOS hi-fi or audio vacuum tubes have gotten scarce and expensive. While the re-issue tubes generally work and sound OK the longevity is nothing like the original tubes. They have a tendency to go Chernobyl if operated even within the design specification.
Sputnik really caught a lot of people by surprise. Here was a nation that could not produce a toaster, or a car, or a washing machine or anything of that nature that anyone would want to purchase willingly.
But they have heavy lift capability into space, launching a 185 pound payload into orbit. At first scientists in the West figured a decimal point had been misplaced. 18.5 pounds, sure. But eventually they realized the Soviets had some first class Rocket Scientists. Uh-oh! And if they can do that, why, they can drop nuclear bombs on the U.S.A.! Sure, they can’t feed or clothe their people or any of the basics of government, but they do have hydrogen weapons.
Oh, I’m not an expert, but the Russian/Soviet slide rules seemed to hold up better. The cursor and hair seem to stay perpendicular after long use. I’ve got a couple from them dating back three decades…and you can still buy them. They probably have warehouses of them tucked away somewhere.
I looked into that years ago but imho their claims were discredited by their saying that there was a secret attempted Soviet circumlunar mission in the early 1960s. There simply was no possible way the USSR could have even attempted such a thing that early. IIRC, the Soviets were in the habit of having probes transmit back recorded voices to test how well their communication equipment worked.
I’m not sure what the claims were with regard to a lunar mission. The way I heard it they did a couple “lob into space” flights before attempting to go into earth orbit. This does make a certain amount of sense, and NASA of course came to the same conclusion and shot Alan Shepard into a parabolic arc. I don’t believe they (the Russians) could have kept this sort of thing under wraps in recent decades, at least.