This was news to me too. I did some surface level research and couldn't find any mention of that.

That said, my parents are from the former USSR and just because there isn't a law on the books doesn't mean it wasn't de facto banned.

> just because there isn't a law on the books doesn't mean it wasn't de facto banned

Same is true the other way around. Just because someone claims something to have happened, it doesn't mean it actually has. Maybe they were just "impossible" to obtain similar to how a lot of non essential things were hard to obtain in socialist/communist countries at that time.