I've read a fair amount about soviet computing history, and this always struck me as odd - they poured so much effort into trying to copy/clone/reverse-engineer

I've read a fair amount about soviet computing history, and this always struck me as odd - they poured so much effort into trying to copy/clone/reverse-engineer western computing equipment, pretty much ensuring that they were always a few generations behind. I read an incredibly depressing account of the Elektronika SSBIS - an effort that started in 1980 to clone the (then ~3-year old) Cray-1, and which managed to eventually produce a handful of prototypes by ~1991 or so (at which point the Cray C90 had just come out - a computer capable of hitting 16 GFLOPS).