[obscurette]

I lived in USSR, but not in Russia but in Baltics 30 years of my life. In Soviet Union you couldn't mail order any stuff. In planned economy you supposed to depend on local shops. In practice it meant that it was really important where you lived and who you knew. The shops a la Radio Shack existed, but these were relatively rare and were mostly full of stuff nobody really wanted or couldn't buy. Things were really different if you lived near some big factory/lab dealing with electronics and knew someone who worked in there. Stealing in these places was very common, even normal. Thing could be prohibitively expensive though, especially if you were teenager.

[dekhn]

thanks. That's pretty consistent with what I've heard. And yet, parts of USSR seemed to have very effective electronics so I assume there had to be some culture promoting EE.

[oleg_antonyan]

EE promotion was a thing via local clubs for kids (aka future workforce to build missiles). But the choice of components those clubs had was limited, so if you find a schemtics for some cool device in "Radio" magazine chances are you won't be able to find all components for it in such club. This sometimes was even mentioned in the article itslef - like you need this transistor which is not available to general public, but "we all know where to get it ;)"

[obscurette]

"Radio" magazine was a constant source of frustration for me as a kid. I was never able to build interesting stuff from there. There was no radio club in the small town where I grew up and the only source of components for me was a small shop in the bigger neighbor town. But this shop had only components mostly for vacuum tubes TV-s and probably unlimited quantity of KT315 and KT361 transistors.

My world changed completely in the end of high school when I was introduced to local radio amateur. We visited this very same shop together and I found out that they had a lot of more interesting stuff available in back room :).