- large academic population and high general education
- a tradition of collecting banned and bootlegged content, particularly Western (samizdat, magnitizdat)
- lack of resources to get things legally (e.g. university subscriptions)
- a culture of hacking and tinkering (the best known book scanning middleware, like ScanTailor and ScanKromsator and various djvu tools, comes from Russian hobbyist programmers).
Also applies to adjacent countries like Ukraine.
Wonder why, was it a thing before the Soviets?
Before Soviets, Russian population was largely uneducated; could not read or write. Soviets immediately started a country-wide educational campaign, Likbez: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez
Soviets did many things, some good and some very bad. But their push for free & universal education has been good.
Speaking of a middle class, it was not unusual that a factory worker's salary exceeded that of a high-school teacher with a university diploma.
An exchange program with Manchester, though? That must have been late in the 80s?
The exchange program ran in early 80s.
Makes sense.
Indeed, while the Stalinist rule was not a particularly popular one, the elderly certainly appreciated how their children became engineers, doctors and such. I mean, I heard my own grandmother saying this about my father often, she was a devout communist all her long life (96 years...) even after the Soviet Union fell apart.