Reddit reviews Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts

This is called survivor bias. You see some soviet tech still working fine and extrapolate to a conclusion that their stuff was built to last. It was not, the soviets produced some awful garbage, with a few well-engineered and well-built gems in between. But on average, I don't think the ratio of well-built stuff is any different from any other societies of the era.

Due to a constant shortage of new things, the soviets were however very resourceful at fixing stuff and creating their own things. For example https://www.amazon.com/Home-Made-Contemporary-Russian-Folk-Artifacts/dp/0955006139

DIY is definitely an important feature of the cyberpunk ethos, so carry on :)

The Russian 'make-it-work-with-what-you've-got' attitude has been around for a loooong time. I remember riding on a (hand-made!) 20' boat on Lake Baikal with a bunch of the scientists from the Limnological Institute in Irkutsk back in the early 90's. The boat had a cabin, stove, bunks, the works, and lots of odd-angled, surprisingly high quality riveted aluminum.

It had been a group project for the scientists, and apparently they had hand-built the craft out of salvaged material from a plane crash just a few months prior. None of them were shipbuilders per se, but the ability to adapt what was available to what was needed common to all of them was genuinely impressive.

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There is a book that shows pictures of Russian/Soviet artifacts from this time period. Absolutely worth checking out if you're interested in this kind of thing. It's called Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts, by Vladimir Arkhipov. It's hard to track down, but well worth it if you can.