That's easy: Russia is leaning pretty hard anti-west right now, and if any of it's citizens are doing anything to annoy anything from the west, they will cheerfully let it continue so long as it doesn't cause them problems at home.
Ignoring foreign copyright was a survival mechanism and by this point, it's almost culturally ingrained.
Sure it does; Russian police do nothing about credit card theft because (and to the point that) that money is ultimately coming out of Western pockets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk).
Same as the North Koreans with their industrial-level counterfeiting of USD (to name one example), for the same reasons.
Might as well be an unofficial letter of marque.
> Why is it that Russian citizens are the most important preservers of Western culture now?
What do credit card thieves and counterfeiters have to do with it? Are credit card thieves preservers of Western culture now?
From the AP Archive -
I feel like its objective fact that Russia is doing whatever is can to undermine the west, considering that they are currently committing industrial sabotage in Europe on a large scale.
I think the OP's comment is meant that the view everyone aligns to a "Nationstate" is simplistic.
The fact that the press release specifically mentions their russian is some kind of political doublespeak.
The true lesson here is that hackers can come from every nationality and that individuals who are trying to enlighten and enrich society will be persecuted by the powers that be. It's a story as old as history itself.
But what exactly did they want? The KGB to send Tolkein fans to the Gulag?
As USSR turned into a “normal” corporate state with a twist, and began having economic relations with other “normal” Capitalist thugs, it started having minimal bilateral agreements that allowed things to move. Post-war reforms in local laws extended copyright terms inside the Soviet Bloc, and made them more similar to the Western agreements (even though licensing deals though the Iron Curtain were exceptions).
Finally, in 1973 USSR joined Universal Copyright Convention of 1952, at the latest possible moment its old terms were still in effect. As a result, everything published before 1973 could be used on old terms, — in particular, translations did not need explicit authorization. Of course, that hurt the Soviet writers in the same manner, but not a lot of people wanted to read Socialist Realist stories about imaginary workers of imaginary factories. As for everything published after 1973, All-Union Agency of Author's Rights handled and controlled all trans-border copyright transfers both ways, and dealt with the money — until the last years of Soviet Union, when free press, and private contracts with publishers made them irrelevant.
A translation of “Hobbit” was published in 1976, a print run of 100 000. An abridged version of “The Fellowship of the Ring” was published in 1982 and 1983, both runs of 100 000.
https://fantlab.ru/autor19/alleditions
Even with the arbitrary government-defined ruble exchange rate, they probably wanted to collect at least some money.
Afterwards, post-Soviet countries joined the worldwide copyright agreements. One of the negative outcomes of those Soviet and post-Soviet copyright extensions made to align local and global law was that previously public domain content (like photos, which newspapers and archives often didn't even bother to track properly) became copyrighted once again, which usually put it into a limbo of orphan works, and prevented re-distribution of old products containing it.
We should be all working together and not against each other. But the world is not simple, and people have complex, and sometimes selfish motivations.