I thought the quality of an optical system came down to it's resolution and its freedom from aberration. If I'm not mistaken, it's not hard to achieve "perfect" optical resolution (1/2 a wavelength of light?). Mitigating aberration is done with stacks of lenses with different refractive indices, which requires a specialist glassmaker. But Russia has specialist glassmakers. I don't think it's possible to achieve complete freedom from aberration, but I don't know.
