What I always found intriguing, whenever I added a Soviet device into my collection, is how ALIEN they appeared inside. Dave pretty much pointed out the oddities in his mk-52. Strange chip packages, odd ways of doing things, etc. My Mky-1 has a metal can chip, a staggered lead chip, and a "wrongly sized" DIP, that is just scaled too big for it's pin count. It uses a VFD in a cylindrical tube, like an elongated radio style tube... and it was made in 1989 (or maybe 1990). Inside my 4-71b, I had initially thought a fuse holder was a choke or inductor at one point, early on. It was just different. The sizing and overall configuration seemed off...
What it was, was the effect of the cold war. While The US and Europe had open standards between one another, imported and exported, and embraced low cost asian manufacturing, effectively unifying the design styles for electronic component standards across the US, Europe and Asia, the USSR was always the odd one out. The US and Europe and Asia played "Keep away" with the USSR. They had to get products across the border and reverse engineer things. We point our fingers at China today, when it comes to knockoff products, but you ought to look up some of Russia's knockoff calculator (and more) designs! Some knockoffs are simply beyond blatant (
http://www.leningrad.su/museum/show_calc.php?n=26 Elektronika B3-04). They learned a lot by taking apart US, european, and asian calculators. They even had a functional knockoff of the HP 9100 (
http://www.leningrad.su/museum/show_calc.php?n=211 Elektronika T3-16)!
Hey, at least the documentation in Soviet Russia was good...
In Soviet Russia, tech support provide by you, worker.
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