Good old days of COCOM list?

I think the Soviet IT industry really suffered due to the obsession with stealing Western designs. Rather than building their own native architectures and systems, the focus was on having KGB spies infiltrate Western companies, on smuggling Western systems through third countries and reverse-engineering them, etc... When your focus is on copying someone else, you will never do better than them, the best you can hope for is, if you copy them perfectly, you will be their equal. If they had put the same effort into innovation, they might have come up with advances ahead of what the West had. But, they had to do what their political masters told them to...