I've heard that the poor performance of soviet armor and some warplanes, even in cases where the equipment is superior on paper, is due to the soviet union producing 'monkey models', intentionally half-assed versions for export- tanks with steel ammo instead of tungsten, jets with a 20 mile radar instead of 100, etc. Obviously training and logistics were probably the critical factors in the poor performance of soviet bloc equipment versus western around the globe, but do we know how extensively 'dumbed down' export equipment was? Was this to save money, or for other reasons?
In some cases Soviet equipment was "monkey modelled." One reason is that things are cheaper and poor countries can afford them. The other is that the Soviets did not want their higher-end technology to fall into Western hands.
During the Hungarian revolution, a T-55 was crashed into the British embassy and it was broken down and taken back to Britain for analysis. The British discovered it had very thick armour and consequently decided to up-grade their guns to the Royal Ordnance L7 105-mm rifled gun; this weapon was consequently used by the West German Leopard 1, the American M60 tank and very early models of the M1 Abrams.
They never exported the T-80 during the cold war and consequently we were never able to get a hold of one; only after the cold war was SIS able to successfully get their hands on the T-80 (a fun story, but not for here.)
The main western source for the term "monkey model" is a man named Vladimir Rezun: alias, Viktor Suvorov. He was a Soviet staff officer who defected to the West and wrote a book called INSIDE THE RED ARMY. You can read it online. Some of it has been widely disputed and the man himself has written some very spurious history books.
Suvorov claims that the USSR had these designs so that they could be rapidly produced in war time. Soviet industry produced them to iron out any flaws in the monkey model designs and to gain practical knowledge about their use and production via selling them to satellites or other countries.
Here is what he says: "The `monkey-model' is a weapon which has been simplified in every conceivable way and which is intended for production in wartime only.
For instance, the T-62 tank is one of the simplest fighting vehicles in the world. But as it was being designed, a still simpler version was also being developed, for wartime use. The `monkey-model' of the T-62 does not have a stabilised gun, carries simplified radio and optical equipment, the night-vision equipment uses an infra-red light source to illuminate targets (a method which is twenty years old), the gun is raised and turned manually, steel rather than wolfram or uranium is used for the armour-plating piercing caps of its shells."
I will postulate one other reason for this: the Soviets had limited industrial capacity for certain things, especially complex mechanics and definitely electronics. They did not want to spend their industrial capacity for these systems exporting them.