The clothing may have been drab, unfashionable and with little choice available in colour or style, but I doubt all of it was shoddily made. In Britain during wartime and post-war austerity, fabric was in short supply and so clothing was expensive and used up a lot of ration coupons. Accordingly by government directive all manufactured clothing was expected to be hard-wearing and last for many years. My dad's 1948 demob suit lasted decades beyond his first post-war employment - largely because it didn't fit and he hated it - however he continued to wear his grey gabardine demob raincoat well into the 1980s, and even then when it was retired from regular public use it continued to serve as tough gardening wear (of course it also helped that my dad was almost as slim in his 60s as he'd been in his 20s). 

To my mind it makes economic sense for the authorities in the CSSR to have restricted choice and discourage wasteful fripperies (such as different coloured or textured fabrics, plus unnecessary pleats, wide flairs or lapels that all use extra cloth), however to skimp on the overall quality - such that clothing was less durable and more often needed replacement - makes little sense. So while I don't actually know whether Soviet-era clothing was particularly well-made, or not, it certainly would make sense for it to have been functional and long-lasting. Indeed if it was 'durable-but-drab' I can well understand people having affection for sturdy, long-lasting clothes of the type that they'd grown up with and been accustomed to wearing for many years.

'Shoddily-made' is how Tony Judt describes them in his book 'Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945'.

In 1975 I went to the Poznan trade fair in Poland on business and I would say that the clothing was not just drab but poorly made.  I did not go to the Brno trade fair in the CSSR but the Foxboro reps I knew who went there commented the same.  My father went on holiday to Leningrad at about the same time and I can remember him commenting to me that some of the clothing that people were wearing was so bad that he wouldn't have donated it to a tramp.  
Foxboro, the company I worked for, exported goods into Eastern Europe.  The Poles, rather than pay for it in valuable hard currency, wanted to exchange the goods for components that they manufactured.  However, Foxboro QA rejected them as being of too poor a quality.

This is from a 1979 article from the USSR concerning Western and Soviet jeans

Lev Kuklin (1979) ‘A writer’s notes: knights of the jeans culture’, Zvezda, no. 10, October.

Note: Zvezda (The Star) was a Russian cultural magazine published monthly in Leningrad from 1924. Lev Kuklin was a Russian poet and songwriter, renowned for celebrating Soviet daily life.

'It may surprise you, esteemed readers, to know that right now, at the end of the seventh decade of the 20th century, in a country where all people are equal, in some Moscow and Leningrad schools our children are divided into three classes according to the sort of trousers they wear. The first, highest or ‘deluxe’ class includes those who are lucky enough to wear genuine American, ‘stateside’ jeans with the labels Lee, Levi’s or Wrangler. These jeans aren't sold in stores, and they carry such prestige that their price on the black market has already approached 200 rubles! The second class of schoolchildren consists of those who wear blue jeans that have been manufactured under license somewhere in Malta or Finland. Their going price is lower than that of the American jeans-50 or 60 rubles. Finally, in the third and lowest class of human material are those unlucky ones who have to be content with Indian, Polish, Bulgarian or, God forbid, Soviet-made jeans. These jeans are readily available, but they afford no prestige whatsoever to their wearers. […]

This custom of according status to one’s classmates according to the jeans they wear reflects an alarming tendency. Our children mirror our way of life, our upbringing, our literature and our propaganda. In this case, their behaviour is a symptom of philistinism in our present-day society. […]

Such a lack of culture is inexcusable in our society. The October Revolution was, in part, a revolution of the spirit that liberated the great spiritual potential of our country’s peoples. In the early, difficult days following the Revolution, material goods were plainly scarce, but the spiritual goods that the young Soviet government put into circulation were astonishing. Whole peoples were drawn to libraries and museums. A new literature and art were created, and illiteracy was eliminated in Russia in record time. Today, when every normal young person has a realistic opportunity to obtain an education at
any level, spiritual ignorance should be regarded as an anti-social phenomenon. Such ignorance is a threat to society wherever it occurs. And it is especially disgusting, and even frightening, when it is covered up by professional training, or even a higher-school diploma. […]

I think young people’s attitudes reflect a failure of our upbringing. Evidently some of the members of our younger generation are being reorientated toward a kind of money-making pragmatism. While no one with any economic common sense would deny the importance of material incentives, I think that, in emphasising the material, we sometimes lose sight of our lofty spiritual guideposts. In the world that stands opposed to us, people quite clearly know how to work. And German machine tools, French perfumes, American cars and Japanese transistors exist as objective givens in that world. But in that world we also see a generation's total confusion in the face of the steamroller of material progress. And it is necessary that our young people hear, from the pages of our press, the despairing outcries of those who scream: ‘We have everything, but nothing to live for!’
[…]
Nowadays cinema and television, in addition to literature, have an important role to play in propaganda for our Soviet way of life. It is disturbing that in recent years our television has tended toward increasing emphasis on sports and detective programmes. Moreover, it is unpardonable when, in television and cinema, genuine heroes are replaced by movie idols or howling imported or domestic television idols – with or without jeans.'

The CSSR produced the Skoda car which literally became a joke in the UK and the GDR produced the Trabant.  East Germans had to wait seven years to buy a Trabant car; an inelegant box-like vehicle with a two-stroke engine that spewed out fumes.  It was a joke, even in the east, but was appropriately to form part of communism’s unpredicted 1989 collapse (Sebsteyen, pp.298-299).

Tim

Well I did say that I didn't know whether soviet-era stuff was well-made or not, only that the deliberate manufacture of badly-made clothing didn't make much economic sense to me (within the context of the time and place). At that time the retail of shoddy goods made much more sense in western Europe and the USA, where fashions changed rapidly, there was often a use-once-and-throw-away ethos, people generally had more disposable money and overall their stronger currencies could readily buy inexpensive ready-made garments from developing countries that relied extensively on low-paid female and child labour. Frankly though I'm not really surprised by what you say as a lot of soviet policy didn't seem to make much practical sense.

PS

For what it's worth in winter I still regularly use the Russian-made ushanka hat that I bought for almost nothing from an East Berlin street trader in late December 1989 (at the time it was well below freezing and I desperately needed a better hat). Then, and subsequently over the 30 years since, it has repeatedly proved its worth as being hard-wearing, water-proof, practical and moreover very warm in extreme winter conditions. Frankly it's been superb.

MM

it so happened that I have recently been in Brno in the Czech Republic and so had the opportunity to ask a couple of people concerning what clothes were like during the communist area.  One was a Czech born in the early 1960s who had also lived abroad for a bit and one was a Canadian Academic who took up a posting at Brno University in 1969, the year after the crushing of the Prague Spring.  They both said the same thing that clothes were, as you suggested well made.  However, they were also in short supply and people also made their own clothes.  

In the 1980s I worked for a time with a Dutch site engineer whose wife was Russian.  He commented that she told him that whenever clothes came into the shops that you rushed and bought whatever you could lay your hands on.  It did not matter if they were the wrong size or you did not particularly like them as you could always exchange them with someone else.

with a shortage of clothing, people had to wear clothes for much longer than in the west and so, even if they were better made it was a case of 'make do and mend'.

Tim

ps The c60 Czech lady who was our guide for a couple of days did give some positives about the CSSR such as a better health care system and pensions but she would still not want the CSSR back.

We also chatted to a Slovak student in his 20s who considered the split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia to have been a mistake.  It was apparently agreed by politicians on both sides without any referendums.

While I can understand the historic reasons why Slovenia and Croatia sought and fought for their seperate independence when Yugoslavia broke up, I do not see what issues were so pressing that Czechia needed to separate from Slovakia. They had always had a close history, were ethnically and culturally very much the same people, with economies based on the same sectors and with their economies deeply inter-twined. And in the end after their mutual separation they both ended up as fellow members of the EU.

Quite frankly in terms of this thread, I think it's quite possible that Czechia and Slovakia might well actually reunite to perhaps form a new 'Bohemia' as I've already alluded to above. Or at least in the short term they might form a mutually supportive, "small Slavic" pact within the EU with say Slovenia and Croatia and maybe with other ex Yugoslav countries such as Bosnia, Montenegro and even Serbia (although historically Serbia has always been rather more wedded to Mother Russia than to western Europe). Note that linguistically Czech, Slovak, Slovene and Croatian - Serbian and Montenegrin too and at a somewhat greater remove Polish as well - are similar languages: at a very basic level are often almost mutually intelligible.

Quite a good case can be made for restoring the Federal Republic of Central America (also known as the United Provinces of Central America) which briefly existed as a sovereign state from 1823 to 1841.



If you look at a map of the Americas, the isthmus joining the two continents is made up of a huddle of incongruously small states between vastly bigger countries: Mexico and the US to the north; Venezuela, Columbia, Equador, Peru, Brazil and others to the south. Originally part of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain, when Mexico declared its independence in 1823 the provinces in central America also declared their absolute independence from "Spain, Mexico and any other foreign nation". The Central American Republic thus encompassed what are now Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Belize (plus the region of Chiapas subsequently annexed by Mexico) but, even with all these provinces joined together, the country still had a combined land area and population smaller than any of its neighbours (excepting the small British, French and Dutch colonial outposts on the NW coast of South America). The country's flag was based on that of Argentina (which had also recently declared independence from Spain) and was a white band between two blue stripes representing the land between two oceans and with a central motif bearing the title "Provincias Unidas del Centro de Americas" similar to Argentina's original name, Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata (United Provinces of the River Plate); a phrygian cap denoting freedom; and a line of five mountians (one for each constituent state).


The flag of the Federal Republic of Central America, note how closely it resembles that of Argentina.

However political rivalries between the old provinces compounded by geographical isolation of the different regions, meant that the "united" country started to disintegrate in 1838 when first Nicaragua, followed by Honduras and Costa Rica, separated from the federation.The union effectively ended in 1840 by which time four of its five states had declared independence but the official end came only when El Salvador declared itself an independent republic in February 1841. Since then there has been a fair bit of bickering and even several wars between the successor states ... while the whole region has at times suffered from malign foreign interference, unstable governments, coups and military dictatorships.

Nevertheless despite the failure of a lasting political union, the sense of shared history and the hope for eventual reunification persist in the nations formerly in the union. Various attempts were made to reunite Central America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but none succeeded for any length of time. The latest attempt was in 1921/22 when El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica formed a (second) Federation of Central America. The treaty establishing this federation was signed at San José, Costa Rica, on January 19, 1921 but that's about as far as it went as the Federal Council of delegates from each state never progessed beyond provisional status.

However in 1991 an economic and political organization called the Central American Integration System was formed with all Central American countries as well as the Dominican Republic (on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean). In addition to the historic backdrop in Central America advocates of this latest integration effort regularly cite the European Union as a model to emulate in giving the region long needed political stability, boosting the economies of all the members states, as well as together giving them more diplomatic clout as a shield against their far larger neighbours.

So it's certainly not impossible that in time a state calling itself something like the Republic of Central America might return.