'I don't know. Others are more up on the subject than I am, but my sources indicate that the Soviets's weapons were superior to the Nazis.'
Yes, you could consult this 'Unpatriotic History of the Second World War', http://www.amazon.com/Unpatriotic-History-Second-World-War/dp/1780993781
Access to Western technology was a central preoccupation of the USSR that drove its opportunistic alliances throughout. For the Soviets it was the technology transfer that was the important part of the Hitler-Stalin pact. And then when the alliances changed, the USSR was again preoccupied with technology.
Between 1942 and 1945 the share of US lend lease industrial goods in Soviet supplies grew from 23.1 per cent to 39.5 per cent. America and Britain gave the radios, telephones and cable that put the Red Army in touch with the Moscow leadership and around half of all military supplies, including jeeps, aircraft, tanks, ships and ammunition. Though official policy was to deny the importance of US aid, Stalin said that ‘without the use of these machines, through lend-lease, we would lose the war’. Michael is right of course that the T-34 was superior to the Panzer, and by the end of the war, Soviet tank production outstripped Germany's markedly. (But then the Soviet economy was always better at prioritising one main sector than it was at generalising technologies.)
'The country had pretty good training in science, math, and technology. Too much of their resource went into the military, but they were surrounded by enemies.'
It is true that the Soviets put a lot of resources into technical and scientific training. (A friend of mine went to one of these party schools in Poland, and works now on brain-imaging in a London hospital.) But that was for quite complicated reasons. It was certainly part of the ideology of the USSR that the country was being organised on scientific lines, so that the nomenklatura identified themselves as first and foremost a class of technical experts. Secondly, the prioritisation of scientific training was a sign that that was the area that the leadership had identified as deficient. Thirdly, the USSR's universities had a much better record of pure research than they did of applied science. Many regions accepted the instruction to build more universities by recruiting pure mathematicians (where the capital input is low) but without enough mechanical engineers (where the capital input is high).
It is true of course that the major problem that the USSR faced was that it was surrounded by enemies, and that militated against its development as industrial country (let alone a socialist one). But then that is the point, Socialism in One Country might have been an understandable adaptation to the ebbing of the European revolution, but it was an impossible proposition. The country did not even have the technological base of a capitalist country, let alone a socialist one.