There are these awesome SF writers, Maria and Sergey Dyachenko, and some of their books' plots are placed in an unspecified "normal" eastern european country. This is when you want to write a book with SF plot but do not want it to be about poverty, banditism and misery, which are the only plot devices offered by real, non-normal ex-USSR republics.

Same way, a lot of Soviet writers wrote e.g. detective stories placed somewhere unspecified in the West, because for proper detective you want bars, whiskey, coated detectives, not Komsomol activists offered by USSR peoplescape.