The computing industry in the Soviet Union always lagged behind those of the United States and Europe. The reasons for this were varied, but stemmed from having almost no industrial base at the time of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, no large-scale punched card industry, and no commercial computing industry analogous to IBM that would have helped foster competition. Also, the Soviet government did not aggressively promote computer construction before the Second World War or immediately after.
[...] when their government decided to copy the IBM 360 system in the 1960s instead of relying on their own enormous community of scientific and engineering talent, Lebedev, Glushkov, and several of the Soviet Union’s established computer scientists fought this directive vigilantly while trying to retain faith in their political leaders.
http://www.sigcis.org/?q=node/85/