Ex-Soviets said they made small nukes without triggers, or just said that they made small nukes?
The smaller the nuke, the MORE that you need a trigger.
Triggers decay over a matter of days.
Further, triggers aside, the electronics inside a small nuke deteriorate even faster than those inside larger, more shielded weapons. These electronics ALL require highly specialized maintenance on a VERY regular basis, even for devices that have no triggers (although I'm unaware of any such triggerless devices ever even being made outside perhaps one lab experiment).
Moreover, triggers and electronics aside, the booster component Tritium (which the Soviets and the U.S. both used) deteriorates the entire weapon into little more than a dirty bomb after slightly mroe than eight years.
So stories about functional nukes being "pre-placed" in various hiding places back during the Cold War are laughable from a physics standpoint. Furthermore, stories about small "backpack" nukes being stolen/sold can be disregarded if the story revolves around anything longer than about 60 days prior, presuming that whoever did the stealing doesn't have the means, methods, talent, money, and knowhow to service the electronics, replace the Tritium, and engineer a new, precisely-designed trigger (and anyone who has all of that has no NEED to go stealing old Cold War nukes in the first place).
And that's the kicker: if you have the talent and knowhow and means to precisely engineer the appropriate new nuclear triggers, then you've long-since passed the point where you were able to build your own bombs from scratch.
If you know how to do all of that, then you aren't going to waste your time or money trying to steal old weapons (especially since such weapons might be tricks to trap you); instead, you'll simply be buying U-238 from the Congo (rebels or government factions) or else turning on your own nuclear reactors and/or cyclotrons to make your own fissionable (as well as trigger) material en masse.