It's always been of my understanding that the soviet made lenses (especially the zeiss/jena copycats) focused in the opposite direction of more "mainstream" lenses like that from the Japanese and West Germans, as a way of circumventing the patent laws when they were almost directly copying the west German stuff. This especially applied to lenses produced in the 50s-60s and could've stuck around as a matter of production habit from that point on. I admittedly haven't looked too deep into the matter, but that's the answer I've most commonly come across when reading about other vintage soviet lenses.