I once read a story of a captured North Korean MiG fighter, which had been flown by a defector to S. Korea. Before the jet was returned, it was stripped and examined by US experts, and one of the astonishing discoveries was that it had no transistors aboard. Instead, circuit boards were studded with tiny vacuum tubes, the size of rice grains. The Soviets did not have the technology to make transistors, so they continued to develop and improve their vacuum tube technology way past the point where we had totally abandoned them.

As a student, I was exposed to some Soviet radio technology, and although it was not as advanced from an engineering standpoint as ours was, they were very clever in how they compensated for it with their science. They were very good. They had developed a microwave interferometer radio telescope which used the reflection off a lake as the second feed, and the additional distance traveled by the wavefront after bouncing off the water as the baseline. The changing signal geometry due to earth's rotation was compensated by analog circuits.

And I suppose everyone has heard the (probably apocryphal) story about how NASA spent millions of dollars developing a pen which could work in zero-G, while the Russians just issued their cosmonauts a pencil.