Combatpigg: Sure, that was the case! I was racing against the "professional FAI pilots" quite frequently as I live in Finland Some 50 kilometres away to the south is Estonia , over the Gulf of Finland , the hot place especially for Soviet Combat pilots as Baltic states were all part of the empire ( now NATO countries).. The quality was high, and they were very serious about it, for the greatest part because it allowed them to travel to west to competitions and see with their own eyes, what was the reality here. Somebody might not like, if I tell the "other side of the coin": That was, they had to attend, after being chosen to CCCP team, spend week in "political training" that included the fact that their families were actually hostages, in a situation they would not return home. It also had one , for us funny feature: They actually didn`t perform to the max. They said : Just enough to make the team, with room for improvement,. in case some "outsider" tried to sqeeze them out of the free trip to those horrible capitalist countries... So they were UTTERLY PROFESSIONAL, in every sense of the word. Now when there is no state support, or free trips, Those best machinists have turned to enterpreteneuers that squeeze the most (money) of their very well made products. The quantities are very low, but still much more than in Soviet time, when a couple engines and models was a OK production run per year to reach their goals. In my mind, they could use some inspiration from Western model engine trade, where Italian Picco-Novarossi etc grind out some 1000 to-10.000 engines per month with similar quality and precision, not to talk about COX engines with over million engine production runs and price tag of removing one zero from the retail price of present day Russian/ukrainan competition F2A engines ( $ 1000,- >>> ..$ 100,- ).