Yeah, the Russians had to do many things on the cheap. Having no budget to build a motor like the ones we developed for the Saturn V, the Russians attempted to simply add more of their little motors to a rocket in an attempt to build a rocket that could carry humans to the Moon. Unfortunately, without sophisticated computers to keep them all in sync, they had a massive explosion during testing destroying one of their launch sites and killing untold people which was immediately hushed up for decades. "Nyet, we were never planning on going to the Moon!" 
And now Zook says the pencil thing isn't even true. 
Actually, that was two different incidents the Soviets had; one was an experimental R-16 ICBM fueled by nitric acid and hydrazine that blew up on the pad and wiped out a bunch of people including the chief of the Strategic Rocket forces in 1960, and the other was a test-flight in 1969 of the N-1, their lunar booster (the one with 30 first-stage engines) that stalled on launch, fell back to the launch pad, and blew sky-high (in the largest non-nuclear explosion ever set off by human beings).
They actually tried four times to get the N-1 to work; every time, something different went wrong, and every time, the flight ended in an explosion.
On the other hand, they've been flying astronauts into orbit on variants of the old R-7 Semyorka for over fifty years now, and only had one acknowledged failure during manned launch (the booster caught fire, but the launch escape system pulled the cosmonauts clear before it blew).
The ladies in this thread seem to resemble the Semyorka, engineering-wise, rather than the N-1 or the R-16. (Here endeth the transparent attempt to make this appear to be on topic.)