I visited Odessa in Ukraine circa 2019 and saw all kinds of interesting computing devices and cameras.

It was more about saving resources on software development. East German standard software was usually pirated copies of western standard software with the copyright strings patched to something else. Creating an entirely different evolutionary branch for hardware and software instead of copying doesn't make economic sense, especially when the goal is to catch up.

More like they didn't see the need and didn't invest in early computing and so lagged behind. Something the US very nearly almost did as post-war a lot of people didn't see the point. Software engineers (though they weren't called that) were seen as unimportant secretaries who just typed letters into the computer. Grace Hopper's Navy computing unit famously had to raid other offices at night for resources.

> I suspect this was partly to facilitate cloned hardware, but i do also suspect they wanted their systems to be approachable by engineers from around the world, too, so diverging too much would have been detrimental.

Computing advanced so quickly it showed the Soviet-style communist system for the lumbering boondoggle it was. By the time the central committee deigned to allocate resources for computing they were a generation behind and that only got worse. They stole western design and software because they didn't have the economic leeway to do it themselves.

You need to remember: by the 60s/70s the western economies were taking off in says Warsaw countries were never able to match. They simply did less and did it less efficiently across almost all sectors of the economy. No one had to cheat them or restrict them. They shot themselves in the foot repeatedly.

There were no startups. You had to petition the central government for permission to build more computers. They would assign you a quota. You built that many computers. In the mean time 12 new startups were founded in the US and two of them came up with new chip designs and shipped them to customers. Doesn't take a genius to understand why the soviet sphere was a compete non-entity in computing.

The C64 wasn't affected by the COCOM embargo, so 'export' was legal from West Germany, and import into East Germany anyway. East German citizens who had access to D-Mark (again: western relatives were the key here) could also simply walk into an 'Intershop' and buy a Commodore or Atari 8-bitter. Finally there was also the so-called GENEX catalogue, which was a delivery service run by East Germany where West German citizens could directly buy both Eastern and Western products for hard currency and had them directly delivered to their East German relatives (including C64s):

https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/genex-kataloge-der-sonderb...

16-bit computers were affected by the western COCOM embargo though. It was technically illegal to export a PC or even an Amiga from West Germany into East Germany. So if you wanted to bring an Amiga over the border that would technically be smuggling - in the sense of smuggling them out of West Germany, since that was the illegal part - I bet nobody gave a shit though since quite a few Amigas found their way into East Germany, they were just prohibitively expensive on the 'private market' (around 20..30k (East-) Mark, which was the equivalent of a higher end car - like a Lada 1500 - or about 3..4 years of a typical wage).