The short story you're describing is likely "The Android" (sometimes translated as "The Artificial Man") by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

Plot Summary Match:

The story follows a lonely woman who purchases a male android to alleviate her solitude. Initially, she is dissatisfied with the basic model, which lacks personality. She returns it to the factory for upgrades, first adding more huma...

Likely “A Wife Manufactured to Order” by Alice W. Fuller (The Black Cat, August 1895).

Summary match:

• A customer buys a custom-built android/automaton spouse from a factory and keeps sending it back for “improvements” to its personality.
• Each adjustment makes the companion seem more “real,” but still unsatisfying because the feelings are only programmed.
• The maker warns that giving the andr...

You are looking for

Made for Each Other
by J. T. McIntosh (the Scottish writer James MacGregor)
first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, vol. 17 No. 3, February 1958
(re-printed in The Sixth Galaxy Reader, Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction, several Soviet anthologies, etc.)

Outline of the story

1. A rather lonely, middle-aged woman (Miss Balfour in the original version; her name ...

I dug through a lot of pre-1980s robot stories and the one that exactly matches your description is not by a Russian author at all but by Gordon R. Dickson—it was originally published under the title “Steel Brother” in the December 1956 issue of Analog, and later collected in Dickson’s own volume Steel Brother (DAW, 1964).

Plot‐wise it is almost word‐for‐word what you remember:

• A lonely wom...

This sounds very much like the short story "The Maladjusted Bionic" (original Polish title: 'Źle dopasowany') by the Polish author Janusz A. Zajdel.

Your memory of it being by a Russian author is very close! Zajdel was one of the most prominent science fiction authors from Poland (part of the Eastern Bloc), and his works were often published alongside Russian authors in collections tran...

Old Sci-Fi Short Story Identification: "Perfect Man" by Theodore Sturgeon

According to the Stack Exchange thread you linked, the story has been identified as "Perfect Man" by Theodore Sturgeon. The original poster confirmed this in their accepted answer.

The story matches your description exactly:

• A lonely woman purchases a male android
• She repeatedly sends him back to the factory for ...

This sounds like "The Partner" (also translated as "The Companion") by Ilya Varshavsky, a Soviet science fiction writer. The story was originally published in Russian in the 1960s.

The plot matches your description very closely:

• A lonely woman purchases a male android companion
• She keeps sending him back to the factory for upgrades to make him more human-like
• First he's too basic and me...

<think> Hmm, the user is asking about identifying an old sci-fi short story involving a woman who buys a male android and repeatedly sends it back for upgrades. They recall it was likely from a collection of Russian sci-fi stories published before the 1980s. The key plot points include the woman's dissatisfaction with the android's lack of character, absence of opinions, and programmed emotions, c...

You’re thinking of 
“The Perfect Woman”
 by the American satirist Robert Sheckley.

Outline of the story
• A lonely person (in the original it is a man named Sam, in several Russian translations the sex of the buyer was switched, which is why many readers remember the customer as a woman) orders a life-sized household android from a company that offers a whole catalogue of personality “modules”....