I'm not going to go to the work involved, but if someone did a calculation on fatal accidents per human delivered to space, I don't think the Shuttle would look all that hot compared to Soyuz.

Russian hardware has its problems, but it comes from a heritage of space design that was more interested in getting the job done than it was in financing years of intensive research and development, and employing the maximum number of people in the maximum number of congressional districts.

Generally, Russian basic space hardware Just Works. Not as efficiently, maybe, or as elegantly as ours, but it works, and it's cheaper.

That the U.S. is currently launching a massive, multi-billion dollar effort to field a rehashed Apollo-Saturn is not something I'm proud of.