Yeah, that *never * happens here…
I’m not trying to be inappropriately political, just irreverent.
The version of this I’d heard was also Soviet and involved a quota. Supposedly, a shoe factory decided the easiest way to meet its quota was to make ten thousand identical shoes rather than five thousand pairs. Obviously this was a comment on the problems of a planned economy. No idea whether or not it was actually true.
Alas, reality is much more boring than misremembering the past. The first two shoes were both lefties, but the rest were pretty much a 50/50 split.
That last link goes to the Great Maritime Shoe Loss of 2002. This was preceded by the Nike Overboard Snafu PDF of 1990. It too, had involved losses from both feet.