Those same 'dreary' soviet conditions led to the preservation of some pretty cool industrial skills. Their level of automation and quality tooling was quite far behind the rest of the industrialized world, especially at the end. This means that much of the welding that we do automatically, they did by hand. Even some of the metal forming (like airplane skins) was done by hand. Because they had crappy machinery, they learned to use their hands to make up for it. Some extremely talented welders and fabricators came out of the Soviet Union. In fact, one of the Shelby Cobra replica builders has their alluminum bodies hand beaten out of sheets of alluminum there. It's the only place in the world where they could still find craftsman with the metal shaping skills to produce them.
I bet you could set up a heck of a bike factory over there right now. Labor is cheap (except for the corruption) and you can still find very skilled ex-aircraft fabricators. Anybody on this board a venture capitalist?