Gas-powered boots

I stumbled upon a slide show on the New York Times website: (here)

It has several pictures of a Russian-developed gas-powered boot. I thought it was interesting, because, as the captions point out, Russia is usually thought of as being technologically advanced and research based, but you don't see the kind of commercial success that you seen from Japanese/German/Korean (etc.) technology and manufacturing.

Apparently, "Like the gas-powered boots themselves, Russian scientists still are trying to gain traction in the capitalist world."

But hey, the boots get 70 miles per gallon.