Comment by optymizer
We had a Lada Samara. It was considered a good car in the 90s. I have "fond" memories of helping my dad push the car to the nearest gas station whenever we ran out of gas - which was a few times a week, because we usually didn't have enough money to fill up the tank. Sometimes he'd drive me most of the way to school, the car would run out of gas, and then I'd walk the rest of the way. He'd then figure out a way to get just enough gas to drive the car back home.
My uncle had a Lada 2101 ("Kopeyka", i.e. "1 cent") and that was a rust bucket, but he also drove it on unpaved country hills for decades. He was growing watermelons and he used his Lada to transport the watermelons to the farmer's market. You would be amazed to see how many watermelons fit in that small car.
Both of these were better than my grandfather's Moskvich. I actually liked the rugged feel of the Moskvich, but it had a known design fault with the handbrake causing it to malfunction, so for uphill parking purposes, we always had to carry a brick or two in the trunk.
I wanted to cross a mountain in Uzbekistan by bike. As I found myself pushing my bike up a dry riverbed full of large stones, I thought, “Who the hell mapped this as a vehicle track on OpenStreetMap? No one could drive this”. And then I was twice passed by locals in some ancient Soviet-era vehicles that coped with the terrain just fine. I had to respect that tech, which could probably be repaired with simple tools.
Not sure what they were, though. LuAZ-1302? Liva Nivas? Simple Lada models (whether praise or mockery) are part of folklore in several countries outside the former USSR, but I feel like Soviet 4WD vehicles are talked about less internationally.