Actually, the technology that Putin was trying to steal ultimately helped bring his masters down. Towards the end of the Eighties, there were a number of youth initiatives bringing American and Soviet kids together through the internet. We would supply them with computers and training and let them and our kids have at it.
There were calls at the time that this was opening us up to new forms of espionage and in hindsight the whole premise was naive. But then came the April coup in ‘91 and the clique that ran it tried to tell the world that Gorbachev was either dead or incapacitated. All of a sudden, US messageboards were flooded by posts saying “He’s alive! Don’t believe them!” A crack had been opened in the Evil Empire.
Even after the Iran election crisis, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the potential of the internet to change societies, especially closed ones.
And the technology that Putin was trying to steal had been supplied surreptitiously by the Reagan/Thatcher people in the form of pre-loaded computers that had software the Russians needed for their Finlandize-Europe-by-gas-pipeline project and for the missile projects needed to counter the more fantastic implications of “Star Wars”. The software was engineered to give subtly wrong answers and the pipeline(and missile programs) spent huge amounts of money going off on dead end tangents. The funniest part of the whole thing was years later the NYT blaring indignation that we had won by cheating, and it didn’t count like we should re-establish the USSR as penance.