Why were the tanks of the USSR so much better designed and so much more effective as opposed to their German counterparts?

Strategic Bombing of German industry, lack of raw
materials, slave labor, no fuel, etc. - these were all factors in the design and
manufacture of weapons of war.

Then there is another
factor... The United States alone produced tanks in a ratio of 10-to-1 to Germany.
American tanks were so bad that after Normandy the Army used to just put recruits out of
basic training in them and send them off to die. Eventually we overwhelmed the Germans
with numerical superiority.

On the Russian Front, the T-34,
however, effectively made all German tanks produced to that date obsolete. In fact, at
its height the T-34 was deemed so successful, and so capable in every role, that
production of all other tanks except the IS-2 was stopped to allow all available
resources to be used exclusively for this tank. The T-34 forced the Germans to adopt
new, heavier designs such as the  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_tank">Panther and  title="Tiger I" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_I">Tiger, which in
turn forced upgrades to the Soviet, United States and British tank fleets. Perhaps more
significantly to the ultimate course of the war, the move to more complex and expensive
German tank designs overwhelmed the already critically strained German tank-production
capability, reducing the numbers of tanks available to German forces and thus helping to
force Germany to surrender the initiative in the war to the
Allies.

Soviet tank production outstripped all other
nations with the exception of the United States. The Soviets accomplished this through
standardization on a few designs, generally forgoing minor qualitative improvements and
changing designs only when upgrades would result in a major
improvement.

Hitler ordered even heavier and stronger tanks
to be produced, which led to the development of the heavy  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_II">Tiger II, which replaced the
Tiger I late in the war. Its powerful gun and very heavy armor made it superior to every
Allied or Soviet tank in a head-to-head confrontation, but the underpowered engine and
the enormous fuel consumption limited its use in maneuver warfare. Right before the end
of the war there were plans for even more heavier tanks, such as the Panzer VIII
Maus, but only small numbers, or in case of the Maus only prototypes, were
produced.