[bitwize]

Russians have a significant presence on the ZX Spectrum game and demo scene. There may be something to this.

[stevekemp]

There were several similar Z80-based systems made at the time, locally, such as the Hobbit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbit_(computer)

[bitwize]

But to clone the Speccy they first had to obtain one (or a few) :)