Jonah: The old USSR was of course an economic disaster, but they had a small number of marketing successes. When I was at college in the early 1960s, Soviet alarm clocks were much prized. There was a store in London that sold them, except when they were out of stock, which of course they usually were. The clocks were the old mechanical type, built in the rugged Soviet style, with big domed bells on top. They weighed about ten pounds each, and woke the whole street. A classmate of mine had one, which he named Lenin; but he lived in a college hall of residence, and they made him get rid of it.