The story of early hackers in the US and Western Europe in the '60s-'80s is fairly well known. Were there hacker cultures in the USSR or Warsaw Pact countries as well?
There is a classic book I highly recommend that is very detailed:
Beating the System – Hackers, Phreakers and Electronic Spies (1992) by Owen Bowcott and Sally Hamilton. It’s about the 80s European hacker scene and (in)famous early hackers like Edward Singh – or the West German hacker ring (Urmel, Pengo, Hagbard, etc.) who passed western military information to the KGB. Hagbard’s body was later found in a forest near Hannover, burned to death with gasoline. The death was considered a suicide. It covers both sides of the curtain at the time, including Russian cloned hardware.