yes and no. Significant share (seems most) of major USSR car manufacturers started as a transfer of technology deal and improvement on its own has been pretty small and incremental since then. VAZ - Fiat (196x), GAZ - Ford (193x), AZLK/Moskvich was "refreshed" by the complete factory transfer of the Opel's one right after the WWII, ZIL - original 1917 and total re-equipment in 193x - to build Italian and American cars under license (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZiL#History), UAZ models naturally trace back to the GAZ, and its most known and widely used - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAZ-469 - hasn't changed much in 50 years. KAMAZ though doesn't look like an outright transfer and is kind of local success story, yet also not much improvements in 50 years (probably for the same reason of absence of any real competition as the USSR planned economy basically segmented manufacturers into their own quasi-monopoly segments) .