...  I found it very interesting traveling around Russia and the east block
 countries right after the iron curtain and the Berlin wall came down.
 I had taken one semester of Russian language in college but I
 only retained half a dozen words. I got a "D" :)

 We hired a couple of English speaking graduate Physics student to guide
 and drive us around St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg, once a beautiful
 city, reminded me of a Mexican border town.

 They told us a dozen jokes on what it was like during the Communist era.

 One was: "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" :)

 What a shame several hundred million people had to live
 through that for 70 years.

 Paul Lamar

My friend Sergei told me that at one point in Moscow there was a claim
that soon every Russian would be able to afford their own airplane.

When someone asked "What would I do with an airplane?", the suggestion
was ...  "Well, if one heard that meat was available in (then) Leningrad,
one could quickly fly there to buy meat before it was sold out."

R

I had heard the reason the Russian training planes had such small
fuel tanks was to keep students from escaping the country.

Russia is another country that could now really use a low cost
rotary powered airplane that can run on auto fuel. No roads
to speak of. At one time Vaz Lada made copies of Mazda rotaries
some of which were A/C certified in Russia. They were not quite as
well perfected as the real Mazda engines. There for awhile the
Russians were interested in the Mistral engine if Mistral ever
got it certified so they could sell rotary powered helicopters
in the US. The worlds largest single market for helicopters.
The Police and KGB also used rotary powered Lada's so they could
more easily catch the crooks :)

Paul Lamar