The Russians had trouble with screw design and milling, sound isolation, rafting and QC in construction. Their nuke boats were built to be fast and deep and were thus biased to engineering solutions that way.
That QC problem meant they built in redundancy, but Americans have always built in redundancy in their own boats, so I do not weight it as much as others might as a reason for the rafting and screw noise problems. Russian reactors have been "problematic" from a design flaw point of view as far as noise is concerned.
See previous comments. Those who think Russian boats are "crap" are "mirroring". The Russians made deliberate design compromises for what they wanted their boats to do; go fast and dive deeply. If your tactics are to ambush and then run after launch, it matters not how noisy one is after the speed burst or if one's reactor designs produces crews who will die of radiation sickness. There is the American way and there is the Russian way. Both work. Both are extremely deadly and effective against their enemies. How they work against each other is the big question.