They were quite surprised to learn the need to protect their ships from low level visual attack aircraft and a lot of modification and practise was completed on the way South once they had been given professional advice on the threat
I served on the Buccaneer on 12 Sqn in the ASuW role from 1974-78. All our operational training was conducted under exercise conditions against NATO and, predominantly, RN surface vessels. The RN were always of the mind that, with the Soviet Navy having no fleet carriers or Fighter Bomber aircraft to attack them at low level, they were invulnerable to that type of threat and that, whilst they did use our low level attacks to train the ship and crew, the attacks were more for our benefit than theirs; this despite the arrival of Forger in the Soviet inventory and therefore the prospect of an increased capability in subsequent years.
Of course, we always flew over the target after we had released our simulated weapons either to simulate a MARTEL missile or iron bombs (which took us pretty close anyway) and to fully exercise the ships' AD systems. Fed up with the ships always failing to realise, despite our telling them, that we were 'simulated' missiles and not the aircraft themselves and therefore claiming kills against us, we decided on one particular mission to conduct our real weapon release profiles and not to fly over the targets as previously. With a 4-ship we attacked the prime target 3 times from 3 of the 4 cardinal points of the compass with each aircraft simulating one MARTEL launch on each attack. On the last attack from the North, we simulated a toss attack of 4x1000lbers (16 in total) which took us within 3 nms of the target. It was only on this attack that our RWRs began to illuminate and viable kills may have been possible. The Navy claimed kills on this last attack but failed to understand that they had already been hit with 12 MARTEL missiles on the previous 3 attacks.
At the subsequent exercise debrief at JMOTS in Turnhouse a very heated debate took place where the only Navy defence was that the Soviets wouldn't operate like we did!
Shame that they never looked beyond that threat despite them then being a global blue water navy. They learned to their cost during Corporate that there always was an air threat at sea.
Foldie