Comment by anthk
Spaniard here. My dad owned a Lada Samara too; but infinitely tweaked in order to fit the standards on security from Spain in the 90's. It couldn't compete with most of the cars made form the West in the 90's (especially on acceleration and top speeds) but it worked without many issues over 20 years.
Yes, upon entering the cars of my friends' relatives it often was like entering an F16 because of how smoothly their hit 100 kph on highways, but I'm sure most of these modern cars with ABS and whatnot had had repairing/fixing issues in the upcoming years (and not cheap to fix).
In the Netherlands the East German Trabant was a fairly populair hipster car in the 1960s and 70s. East Germans were considered the good Germans.
Dutch customers ofcourse paid in hard currency that the DDR desperately needed so they were quite happy to export them.