There’s also the fact that a lot of people in the system simply don’t care. The state can demand whatever it wants and produce whichever program it wants, but despite what they want you to think, they still do not control everything even in the USSR or modern day Russia. I had the displeasure of being part of that system, so I have a lot of experience here. Most of the time, little Ivan will either simply be rolled into the next class in spite of any bad grades “to not ruin the stats”, or his parents will make a nice “voluntary” contribution to the school’s nonexistent budget and his bad grades will suddenly turn into good ones. From the inside, the difficulty looks a lot more like overcompensating for failures rather than setting a standard, because standards are often completely ignored for various reasons. People often cite Russia’s incredibly high literacy rate. Having lived there, think again who’s measuring those stats and to what standard.