This sort of thing likely led to what one of my Russian professors was pretty proud of: That Soviet microbiologists with some bacteria, a pH meter, and some basic chemicals like sodium citrate could bang out publications, with some well-designed and elegant experiments. We Americans, on the other hand, would spend thousands of dollars on fancy machines, reagents, etc. and were less productive.
"At the risk of oversimplifying, I noticed that because of the traditional scarcity of equipment, Russian students and scientists had to
think
rather than experiment, whether with computers or accelerators; it was often all that was available to them."