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You're right. I am surprised.
I now remember seeing a Public Broadcasting channel show on the B-29s that landed in Russia. (Someone posted pics of "Ramp Tramp" on another thread.) Reverse engineering of those B-29s forced the Soviet Union to develop entire new industries to manufacture the components and sub assemblies. Those interned bombers stimulated a big chunk of Soviet industries.
They sure did. Tupolev was a bit sore that Stalin ordered him to reverse engineer the B-29, as he had his own big bomber concept, but the price of arguing with Stalin was not longevity, that's for sure, so Stalin, in a conversation with Tupolev asked him how long he would need to reverse engineer the B-29 and Tupolev said three years. Stalin replied "You have two". The design bureaus went to work trying to source manufacturers of the equipment and contrary to popular belief, the Tu-4 was not a direct copy, many Soviet substitute parts were used, even the skin thicknesses were different and everything was converted into metric measurements. Many of the radios and so forth had to be directly reverse-engineered, as did the pressurisation system and the turbosuperchargers, which were fitted to Russian engines. These did not have the same issues that the B-29's Duplex Cyclones had, either, being more reliable. One of the biggest hurdles the Soviets had to overcome was the manufacture of the undercarriage legs, they had never built single forgings as big as the B-29's gear before and special machinery had to be manufactured to do it. It was a remarkable achievement given that the Soviet industry was behind the USA in many ways. Its influence found its way into the various aviation research bureaus for dissemination and division between the manufacturing companies. Essentially, there is DNA from the B-29 in almost all Soviet post-war military and civil aircraft of some sort or another.
