[jasonzemos]

That's because they stole it. When you stand on the shoulders of giants it's not difficult to take the next step. In cases where the Soviets outpaced the west, most notably in the space race, they did so for lack of prudence. The US could only tolerate at most one accident (Apollo 1) else the entire endeavor would have been jeopardized. Rigorous testing, empirical investigation, and redundancy all imposed costs on the US. The Soviets instead just devalued human life and kept all their failures secret, lowering their cost to gain agility for progress.

In the end the Soviets produced a very small amount of organic peer-reviewed cutting edge research in contrast to the west. Worse, the politics impressed on its academics lead to Lysenkoism.

[blfr]

They stole some of it but that is what jacquesm is advocating: copying ideas. And in the space race they were also first with the unmanned Sputnik with no such safety concerns.