For many years when I lived in Britain I had a good friend and for a while work colleague who came from Russia. At least when he studied there (so, 30 years ago) their educational system at least for Science and Mathematics was no worse than those in Europe. In fact it's one of the few good things the so-called "Communist" countries tend to do - they invest heavilly in Education.

Beyond that, there are two different things:

• One is a country's capabilities to have sizable industries operating at a certain technological level.
• The other one is finding a handful of specialists for very specific design projects in highly controlled environments where making a profit is no concern.

Whilst it makes sense that Russia has trouble in the first case of actually doing high tech as a business, in size and profitably, because they at least did have a very good educational systems in Science and Mathmatics it also makes sense that they do have people with the know-how there which they could gather for specific high tech design projects were "money is not a problem" since they did train techies as good as the rest of Europe and it was not that long ago so those people are still alive.