Interestingly, 7z is also of Russian origin (Igor Pavlov), and a lot of data compression research comes from there too --- possibly a legacy started by Markov.

That, and the fact that our computers were really shitty. :) It also helped in development of very clever analytical and numerical integration techniques, e.g. Sobol sequences.

That's really interesting. When working under constrainst people get creative. I think it just happend so that most computers that I've worked on don't handle RAR by default so I never knew the background.