I love the old soviet commercial planes. If nobody was sitting in the seat in front of you, you could kick the seat back down and put your legs up!
My favorite was the IL-18: we used to call it the "magic fingers" because of all the high-frequency vibrations in certain seats and it was impossible to see your reflection in the bathroom mirror at certain flight regimes from all the vibration.
Nonetheless, good planes and unbelievably good pilots: I remember landing in Lida during a blizzard in total white-out conditions and several inches of snow on the runway. Perfect landing - so smooth you could barely feel it.
Only flew in them a few times but it was noticeable that my ears didn’t pop on ascent and descent, which I interpreted to mean the plane held sea level pressure at high altitude. In other words, fuselage built like Siberian brick s#!+house! The problem as I understand it with the old Soviet era planes were the engines. Now that they’re flying Airbus the problem would be maintenance of typically fine tuned and unforgiving European engineering. Throw in flying out of an airport where the ground support are Arabs (Egypt employs their own, not technically proficient Asian labor) and you’re going to multiply the problems.
Oh, so you’re the reason all those seat backs were broken. I never had a seat that wasn’t broken in some way and the guy behind me would have to hold my seatback up with his knees. No one of those flying disasters had had one bolt or screw tightened since WWII. You know something’s wrong when you rattle down runways that have trees growing out of house sized chug holes and the burned out skeletons of plane crashes are merely shoved off to the edge.