One joke/observation was that soviet product will either fall apart immediately or will last 70 years.

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.

I think "simple but rugged" would be a more apt description. Less moving parts than the US equivalent, easier to maintain, and usually fairly sturdy. On the other hand, since cost was a constant concern, Soviet equipment was generally not designed with aesthetics in mind. So "ugly but reliable" might be another way to put it!

I saw still working after many years Soviet refrigerators, motorcycles and TV sets, so maybe they were built not that poorly after all. Of course there could be some survivorship bias, but generally modern (inexpensive) things seem to break earlier.

Depends; they might not have had the most expensive materials available, or the trickiest assembly quality, but were often designed so that the inevitable repairs could be made quickly in the field by minimally-trained personnel.

See: Zaporozhets 968 vs. Hillman Imp, AK-47 vs. AR-15, T-72 vs. M1.