The Soviets had exchange students studying in places like Stanford University as early as the late 1950s when this was really cutting-edge technology. Several of these exchange students in the US brought chips home to the Soviet Union handed them over to the Soviet government and enabled these ships to be copied. But copying can only get you so far in an industry that moves at the rate of Moore's law where things change by 2% or 3% a year. If if the industry is racing forward at exponential growth rates then copying something that's a couple years old means that you're far behind where the cutting edge is. That's the problem the Soviets were never able to find a solution to.

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