I can't say anything about the "centuries" part, but the rest sort of checks. In those old soviet countries there was no such thing as "customer service", the politburo didn't get around inventing it and every economic cog was created from above. If a modern American had seen how things were done there, they would have wrongly assumed that a powerful pulp-and-paper lobby was in control. Also, when the thing in question was made in the West (which was often the case for high tech stuff), and somehow smuggled under the iron curtain and Western sanctions, customer support was unaffordable or simply out of reach.