Why were Soviet knives good?
And it must be admitted they were quite decent, at least those produced for the military and hunting knives, which were classified as bladed weapons and required permits. In theory, a system of so-called "state standards" or GOSTs (an acronym for GOsudarstvennyy STandart) operated across all industrial production in the USSR. GOSTs were enforced with varying degrees of strictness in different sectors. Production connected in any way to defense was subject to demanding GOSTs, which they actually tried to adhere to. It is worth remembering that in the USSR, the price of a product might not be closely tied to its manufacturing cost because it was determined arbitrarily, sometimes below cost, for the sake of achieving some goal crucial to the central planners. In such a system, a good knife could cost less than the actual cost of the material and labor. It is a fact that a given commodity could be hard to come by, but the output of the metallurgical industry, and this branch of industry was considered a top priority, was generally available and at prices that would be unsustainable under market economy conditions. Poles from the generation that remembers the trade tourism of the 1970s and '80s still recall the killing one could make selling Russian drill bits in places like Turkey. Granted, there are exceptions to every rule, but generally, one can assume that a knife or an axe bought in a hardware store, even somewhere out in the province, offered a very good price-to-quality ratio.
How did the economic conditions born of the "commie" system affect custom production?
Well, they affected it significantly, which in itself is a paradox, because under communism, the custom production of knives theoretically did not exist. Simply put, private individuals had no right to manufacture knives. For that matter, they had no right to manufacture anything, as private entrepreneurs were virtually nonexistent outside the southern Soviet republics. This did not mean, however, that there was nothing on the market besides the output of state factories. Of course, compared to the volume of state production, these were trace amounts, but they existed nonetheless. I would divide non-state knife production in the USSR into three groups. The only group that could be considered "legal" was custom production from those republics where this form of economic activity was permissible to at least a minimal degree. We are talking mainly about the southern republics: the North Caucasus, Georgia, and Armenia. The other two groups were knives from the "zonas" (places of detention/prisons) and the so-called "levak" (moonlighting/bootleg goods) - meaning production made on state-owned machinery for private use under some criminal arrangement.
The legend of "zona" knives.
In the USSR, all people serving a prison sentence were required to work. Gulags was s system of labor camps equipped with their own machinery production base, and they had production quotas to meet just like any other state factory. Using the prison infrastructure, it was possible to manufacture various products for personal use, and this practice was usually at least tolerated by the prison administration, which took its cut. The suitcases made in the "zonas" and described by Solzhenitsyn in "The GULAG Archipelago", whose handles never broke off, became legendary. By these suitcases, released prisoners recognized each other on the street without a word. The same kinds of legends circulated, and still circulate, among Russians regarding "zona knives". For the most part, it's nonsense; while one can imagine some gifted prisoner-knifemaker with access to reasonably decent steel, what kind of options did someone like that have when it came to heat treatment? Therefore, most stories about "eternal, never-dulling zona knives" should be taken with a grain of salt. Most, but not all. A prime example here are the folding NKVD finkas. The NKVD finka was a very successful combat knife developed for the military and law enforcement agencies in the late 1930s, following the bitter experiences of the Winter War. It was produced in various material variants by different industrial plants over the decades, but a folding variant never existed. And yet, it is a known fact that folding-finka pocket knives did exist. These were rather complex pocket knives, as they featured a crossguard/quillon that unfolded along with the blade. Such knives could have been made almost exclusively in the zonas, and specifically at the request of the prison nachalstvo (bosses/administration). A criminal didn’t need such a knife. Just making a knife was already an activity fraught with considerable risk. Making a folding knife with a guard, besides being technically more difficult, was doubly risky because, under Soviet regulations, a guard was one of the markers of a bladed weapon. But look at it from the perspective of the prison administration. How could a penal colony commander better curry favor with his superiors than by gifting a knife that, on one hand, is known to everyone, and anyone who had ever seen a standard-issue NKVD finka understood at a glance where this pocket knife "got its legs", and on the other hand, is impossible to buy in any store?
"Levak" as a school for talent.
If we dig into the biographies of the biggest names in contemporary Russian knifemaking, we will find that almost all of them were employed at state-owned knife-making plants at some stage of their lives. There is obviously nothing surprising about this, since where else would they look for work? However, if you talk to them in private, a surprising number will admit that back in the day, they participated in the production of "bootleg goods" or "fourth-shift production" (a plant can operate at maximum capacity in three 8-hour shifts, and on the fourth shift (which can't actually exist because a day has 24 hours) things that do not exist, at least in official statistics, were made. "Fourth-shift production" was not made from raw materials bought on the black market, but from what could be saved during the previous three shifts. This system required considerable competence from its participants because, on one hand, you had to know how to utilize the available material very well to carve out a surplus for the "fourth shift". On the other hand, it taught a style of design and craftsmanship where strength, edge retention, and cutting aggression are achieved through optimal geometry and flawless heat treatment, rather than through the use of superior materials or by simply thickening the blade. Why do Russian manufacturers like working with pattern-welded Damascus steel so much? In my opinion, it's because a well-forged and hardened package of cheap, most mass-produced, and therefore most widely available carbon steels allows one to achieve a saw-like effect on the cutting edge that rivals or exceeds the cutting aggression of high-tech powder steels.