Three items only.. in over ten years, and it was more by accident that a-purpose:
- East German made leather-holstered toolmaker's knife-edge square/angle.
- #5 MT HCS finish hand-reamer
- shop-fab CI dovetail stright-edge
"Research", OTOH.. has been ongoing for scores of years... even when no longer a part of the "job":
"USSR" trade zone also included countries that were at least "not hostile", so not very much of it was made in Russia, proper.
A relatively few state-favored companies were de facto "monopolies", covered a given product for most of the whole "East Bloc". Bison chucks. Zeiss optics, etc.
Post-USSR disintegration? The whole economy trended more toward "rent" or percentages skimmed off petro, minerals, timber, basic foodstuffs, and primary metals - which paid more than enough for wide-spectrum import substitution.
Never mind the largest span of surface area of any "nation", the Russian Federation only has a modest headcount population, by world-standards, and an economy only about the same size as the US State of Florida.
Once the forced central planning & prioritization of the Soviet "Military-first" focus was removed in favour of forced prioritization of entities easiest to steal from? There was no longer the "economy of scale" to compete with imports, even if the means of production and the skills of the workforce had been up to it. Mostly, they no longer were. Soviet-era industries were parasitized, hollowed-out, went into decline, then vanished.
USSR's best and brightest that built those higher-tech "bureaus" had aged and died, retired, taken up pursuit of profit, or even emigrated. Very few wre replaced. Better opporuinity took up the next couple of generations that Wodka and declining health standards and reduced opportunity for education hadn't already side-tracked.
Bottom line? USSR's marginal tools were worn out and discarded a generation and more ago.
Their "finer tools" were scarcer, better preserved, but nothing really "special".. and even then easily as likely to have come from East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine.... Belarus... "etc.".. not all that often from "Russia", proper.
- Minor nuisance to a would-be "collector"?
- Major crippler for a present-day RF trying to keep worn-out ral, road, martime, transportation and their once-top-priority armaments industries even functional enough to do repair work, not even get near the ability to perform new production of even highly OBSOLETE tech.
South Korea is far the more capable, and far more modern. All by themselves, even.
And South Korea isn't all that large.
