The west had institutions and processes for developing new technologies and infrastructure and evolving or renewing and replacing them efficiently. What the USSR did was simply copy what the West had, but at the end of doing so instead of having their own institutions and processes for developing new technology and infrastructure, they had a broken cookie-cutter for an outdated version of an industrialized society the west was already moving beyond. They had no process for evolving it into the future, because they had no real process for getting there themselves in the first place.
It's not that they couldn't develop any new technology. They had, and still have centres of excellence and technology sectors they’re very good at, just not enough across the whole economy.
This is why Russia is still such a backwater. It has never developed it's own internal marketplace for ideas, innovation, entrepreneur-ism and technical evolution. The Resource Curse and attendant corruption and political rent seeking has hit them hard. I believe that China has largely avoided this mistake.