It can be hard to wrap your head around some things. The Soviet Union was different in a number of ways. But this video about Russia's first supersonic bomber does a nice job of telling us how it was different. It was a bad design, for one thing. It crashed a lot. Using it as a bomber would have been a hideous experience for a pilot. Flying it was like wrestling a gorilla, there was no copilot, and adding the weight of the bombs would just make it harder to deal with. It wasn't used much as a bomber.. It has an air conditioning system. Russia had vodka, and that was used in the air conditioning system. Russia also had a massive black market, and the pilots and crew would split the vodka that was left after a flight. Vodka could be used like money, the black market was a barter system (for the most part) and vodka was something Russians liked. It's not unusual for a plane to have design compromises, but this takes that to a whole other level.
