Production totals for the MiG-21 are so large they are hard to pin down precisely — credible tallies run from about 11,000 to nearly 12,000. The Soviet Union built roughly 10,645 between 1959 and 1985; Czechoslovakia added about 194; and India’s HAL built around 650–660 under licence. China’s Chengdu J-7 / F-7 — a reverse-engineered derivative — contributed roughly 2,400 more, in production right up to 2013.

That scale is the whole story. A jet cheap enough to build by the thousand and simple enough to maintain from a rough forward strip could be sold to almost anyone, which is exactly why it ended up in some 60 air forces on every inhabited continent. The MiG-21 didn’t win the Cold War in the sky — it simply was the Cold War in the sky, more than any other aircraft.

A pure delta wing is wonderful at supersonic speed and terrible at low speed: it has to land fast and nose-high, and it can’t easily carry trailing-edge flaps. France’s Mirage III accepted those penalties. Mikoyan-Gurevich did not — they bolted a conventional horizontal tailplane behind the delta. That tail gave back crisp pitch control and allowed proper flaps, cutting approach speeds to something a mass-conscript air force could handle safely. It is the single design choice that made a Mach-2 interceptor buildable by the thousand and flyable by the many.

Everything about the MiG-21 was optimised for a fast climb, a supersonic dash and a quick kill — not endurance. Its internal fuel was tiny, giving a combat radius of only around 370 km even in the later bis. Pilots learned to fight in short, violent bursts and get home. It made the Fishbed a superb close-in interceptor scrambled against an incoming raid, and a poor choice for anything that needed to loiter or reach out — the exact opposite trade-off from its stablemate the MiG-25.

Low cost was the entire point of the MiG-21 — it is precisely what allowed more than 11,000 to be built and 60 nations to afford them. But firm dollar figures do not reliably exist: it was a Soviet state product, and export prices varied enormously by variant, year and buyer. Period estimates for export models circulate in the low single-digit millions of US dollars, but treat these as unverified secondary figures. No credible cost-per-flight-hour number exists in open sources either. What is certain is the comparison: where a contemporary Western interceptor cost a fortune, the Fishbed was built and sold like a rifle.