Yes, the Soviet Union did have drones. No, they were not ahead of the curve, nor were they significantly behind.

That's the tl;dr.

Unmanned aircraft—which I will refer to as drones* for simplicity’s sake—are not nearly as revolutionary as one might think by observing how the topic is covered by contemporary media. If there's a revolution happening at all, it's in terms of accessibility. You can buy a commercial drone off the shelf and use it for close reconnaissance or for dropping small unguided munitions, such as hand grenades (which harkens back to the earliest days of aerial bombardment). On the other hand, we have both advanced materials and enough computing power to have a drone cruise around collecting data at high altitudes for more than 24 hours (in fact, the Airbus Zephyr S pseudo-satellite conducted a record flight of more than two months). And we’ve got targeting systems—which, again, rely on computing power and sensors—to use drones as weapons carriers.

Therefore, you’ve got specific areas in which drones have only recently achieved a degree of maturity.

But the idea of using remotely piloted aircraft is neither new nor revolutionary. The first drones appeared during World War One, as part of British efforts to counter the Zeppelin threat. Obviously, these were rudimentary designs, and they were conceived as guided anti-aircraft “missiles” rather than combat aircraft in the proper sense, but they show how early in the history of aviation the idea appeared and was initially tested. The first-ever flight of a drone happened in March 1917 and the honor went to De Havilland's Aerial Target with a remote control system designed by Dr. Archibald Low. The drone's operator was Henry Segrave, a famous aviator and race car driver in his own right.

The next broad stage of drone design was target drones. Here, the American Radioplane Company achieved success in the early 1940s with its small QQ-2 and QQ-3 drones, which are now arguably most famous for helping propel the career of Marilyn Monroe, who began working as a model after David Conover had taken this photo of her. Moreover, after World War 2 there was a huge surplus of manned aircraft which were converted into target drones.

This is when we begin to see the emergence of specialized reconnaissance drones. The mid-1950s saw the introduction of the MQM-57 Falconer, also a Radioplane design, which could fly both on autopilot and under constant radio control. However, we’re still in the stage of small and simple propeller-driven drones. But now we’ve come to the threshold of a mini-revolution on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Around 1952 the United States introduced the Ryan Firebee target drone and the Soviet Union tested its Lavochkin La-17, which from the outset was conceived as both a target and single-use reconnaissance drone. This is the beginning of the era to which the Tupolev Tu-141 Strizh—the drone possibly (20-year rule, sorry) used in strikes against Russian air bases recently—belongs.

The Firebee proved versatile enough to be modified into the Ryan 147 Lightning Bug, whose glory years came during the Vietnam War where many 147s flew dozens of missions. Around the same time as Ryan was developing the Model 147, Lockheed was also working on the supersonic Lockheed D-21, which was introduced into service in 1969.

The Soviets were lagging behind the most advanced American designs. The D-21 was beyond anything they had built around that time. In fact, they got their hands on the wreckage of a D-21 which crashed in the USSR and tried to reverse engineer it, but the effort never resulted in anything tangible. However, if we set the D-21 aside, Soviet reconnaissance drones were of comparable quality and capability to American ones. The subsequent designs of the Tupolev bureau—Tu-123 Yastreb, Tu-143 Reys, Tu-141 Strizh, and finally Tu-243 Reys-D, which was introduced after the collapse of the USSR—were all reasonable and functional designs.

Interestingly, despite the relative success of the 147s in Vietnam, the US military seemed to lose faith in reconnaissance drones in the 1970s. The very promising Compass Cope project was canceled in 1977 along with the two drones developed under its auspices: the Boeing YQM-94 and Ryan YQM-98. These were much more similar to modern large UAVs, which are essentially airplanes without a crew rather than glorified cruise missiles such as the Firebee or the Strizh, which cannot take off and need to be launched. In the United States, the development of modern reconnaissance drones of various description restarted for good only in the 1990s.

As a result, one could argue that in the early 1980s, around the time the Strizh entered service, the US surrendered its supremacy in the field of reconnaissance drones to the Soviets. Even though the Tu-141 and Tu-243 were based on a concept that is now considered outdated, having the benefit of incremental improvements allowed Tupolev to create decent platforms which were more than adequate for battlefield use at the time of their introduction.

20-year-rule spoiler, which I shall uncover in 2034: >!Ukraine has been using its Tu-141s with some success in their actual recon role, not as jerry-rigged cruise missiles, since the initial Russian invasion in 2014!<.

*) Some of my colleagues would punch me in the face for this, but in my opinion, it doesn’t make sense to relegate the term “drone” just to commercial quadcopters.