It is not surprising that it remained intact for 53 years. In USSR, unlike modern times, all products were made to last, like refrigerators, motorcycles, TV sets or clothes, because there was not enough supply to replace them every year.
Any how, it's meaningless to compare old Soviet products to new Western ones. The older Soviet ones are likely still in use due to an incentive to maintain and repair them. Old Western products were probably just as repairable, but there was less incentive to do so. As for new Western products, there are both technological and business reasons to ignore repairability.
“Quality” and chances of success are relative, you need to have reference points. As space missions had none, they all were test flights AND scheduled flights at the same time. If boosters for a new rocket to Venus, radios and solar panels were ready, you launched a rocket with a dummy to check how those systems behaved, and so on.
I mean we couldn't use for the last 53 years and it didn't fulfill its mission. It's like saying the boulder in my yard has remained intact for 100 years "they just don't build them like they used".
See: Zaporozhets 968 vs. Hillman Imp, AK-47 vs. AR-15, T-72 vs. M1.
Other ones:
> What's as big as a house, burns 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shit-load of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces? A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces.
> What is it? It doesn't glow, and it doesn't fit into ass. Answer: soviet thing to glow in the ass.
> A man walks into a shop. He asks the clerk, “You don’t have any meat?”
> The clerk says, “No, here we don’t have any fish. The shop that doesn’t have any meat is across the street.”
Also, exaggerated (but partially true) stories about factory fulfilling production quota for 10 tons of nails by producing single enormous 10 ton nail.
"Soviet microchips are the largest microchips in the world!"