Certain aspects were better, yes. That's because the Soviets made different trade-offs in the design -- variously because of doctrine, time constraints, availability of exotic materials (and the ability to use them in manufacturing), and "helpful" direction from Moscow.

The MiG-25 "Foxbat" is a famous example. To succeed in it's role as an high-speed interceptor it should have been made from titanium. But it's a very expensive and difficult metal to work with, so temperature critical parts were instead made from stainless steel. In the west there were lots of jokes about it rusting in the rain and the use of vacuum tubes, but tubes allowed it to have a very powerful radar. Plus that's what they had to work with (the Soviets having great difficulties making high-current semiconductors).

I don’t know if that is true or not, but if so, I guess it is a stirring endorsement of the idea of being a nice liberal democracy that people want to move to.

I'd be curious to know which aircraft were actually better than their US contemporaries and by which criteria they'd be judged better.

The Mig-25 seems like a good example of a Soviet aircraft considered better than its US contemporaries, at the time. Misunderstanding and misinformation let the US to think they were far, far behind the Soviet Union. Viktor Belenko cleared that up! It was a plane good at just one thing, with downsides that would never let it through a (non-CIA-directed) US procurement process. On the plus side, competition, fear, and rivalry, drove the US to some amazing research, engineering, and innovation.

As a child at a local military airshow, the F-15 was awesome, dangerously beautiful. Shamed even the X-wings and Tie fighters I'd just seen on the big screen. Many years later, I had a similar feeling watching an Su-27 at Farnborough; Sukhoi captured some aesthetic that Mikoyan-Gurevich never seemed to get right, and did it better than any western contemporary.