Two sides to this: popular dissemination and the beginnings of a scene. Regarding popularity, hip-hop reached post-Soviet Russians relatively quickly. People who went to school in the 1990s all remember "rappers" (рэперы, hip-hop fans), a popular subculture that at length permeated even small towns and which had regular bitter clashes with "metallists" (металлисты, heavy metal fans) and various shades of gopniks (subcultures emulating local flavors of career criminals). Even not having heard a single hip-hop track in your life, you could state with confidence that bands like Onyx, Public Enemy, and 2Pac were immensely popular in Russia — if only because of ubiquitous fan backpacks, baseball caps, hoodies, t-shirts, and other (unlicensed) merchandise that filled the streets (and schools) back then. On the other hand, the phrase "рэп это кал" (hip-hop is excrement) became a pre-internet Russian meme and the motto of hip-hoppers' enemies; it is now used in an ironic way to poke fun at arguments about tastes in music.

As for domestic hip-hop music scene: the forefront of street culture in late USSR, in stark contrast with burgeoning Russian Rock, was concentrated in the breakdancing scene: the bad boy crews dancing in the streets, and their pop variants that eventually got their break on TV later, in early 90s — bands like Car-Man and Bogdan Titomir. People with keen ear for US street culture did pioneer rap in USSR quite early; Russian sources tell about the first 1984 "rap" album in Soviet Union (or rather a multi-genre record with rapping inserts made by a local DJ with a band after being impressed with a Grandmaster Flash recording; the rap itself here introduces the listener to, well, rapping). This is emphatically not gangster rap.

However, the first proper, and very successful, gangsta style hip-hop band in Russia was established in 1989, and was called Bad Balance, or Bad B for short. It is significant in that its founder Vlad Valov (SHEFF) is considered the grandfather of Russian hip-hop, and he and the band's members founded the first Russian hip-hop festival, first hip-hop magazine, and a huge hip-hop recording collective/label Bad B. Alliance that spawned many wildly popular Russian hip-hop bands of all flavors. In that sense, it is undisputably the seminal Russian-language hip-hop band even if you discount its own musical output altogether — and it was indeed founded in the USSR before its dissolution, a year after Straight Outta Compton.

(It should be noted though, that proper, traditional career criminals in Russia have their own meta-genre of music which has nothing to do with gangster rap: it's the Russian Chanson, a "sentimental macho" genre borne out of work camp guitar songs and the Russian romance — 19th century sentimental urban ballads about tragic life stories. Gangster rap, Russian or foreign, is popular with criminals only to the extent that it is popular with rough young urban males growing up in the projects in general.)