Innovators, Copycats, or Pragmatists? Soviet Industrial Espionage and Innovation in the Military Aerospace Sector during the Cold War

Abstract

The article presents a theoretical framework for analyzing domestic innovative capability in relation to industrial espionage, drawing on material from the Soviet military aerospace sector, 1946–1990. It employs a structured comparative case study of six Soviet aircraft systems, which are compared to their closest Western equivalent. Three ideal types are used to categorize each case: copycat (mostly copying, virtually no innovation), innovator (mostly innovation, virtually no copying), and pragmatist (copying of specific parts or subsystems). The study concludes that only one of the studied aircraft is a copy, while three are innovative. The remaining two are categorized as pragmatic designs, where some parts may have been copied. This indicates that Central Intelligence Agency estimates of Soviet technological capability seem to have been mostly correct, while some in academia and at the policy level during the Cold War clearly underestimated the Soviets. The general conclusion is that large-scale industrial espionage should not automatically be seen as an indicator of a lack of domestic innovative capability.