Chronologically it was something like this for me:
- My dad visits some sort of technological conference where he sees something, I can only guess, from Tezuka's works on screen. It's probably around 80's. He gets interested. Meanwhile, in USSR cinemas people watch Flying Phantom Ship.
- With fall of USSR, shit hits the fan and consumption of foreign goods grows dramatically. Private businessmen find a golden mine by learning english and chinese and start making trips to countries where they can buy cheap modern goods which have high popularity in Russia. One of the favorite trips is to Taiwan, for example (oh my god, the fucking taiwan female underwear lol). All this stuff ends up at open markets which are barely legal. People get their hands on VHC, and start recording shit they bought there using VHC tapes. This stuff is passed from one person to another.
- Early 90's. Robotech and Sailor Moon are on TV already, supported by pretty huge amount of pirated movies. I'm just at juniour school, I sit in front of SONY TV trying all the VHC tapes there are, even hidden from me by caring parents. Oh, how little they knew
And here's the things I watched without any particular order at time (from age 7 to 14): Lupin, Macross, Mermaid Forest, La Blue Girl, Dragon Pink + Elven Bride on same VHC, Hi No To Ri 2772, Nausicaa, Iria: Zeiram, Bubblegum Crisis, Dominion: Tank Police, Genocyber, Battleship Yamato, Maya, Candy Candy, Galaxy Express, Legend of the Four Kings, Demonhunter Yohko, Crying Freeman, ...well I think you get the idea, there were movies that were allowed for us kids to watch, and movies which were hidden, but we still watched them
So unlike moonies or robotechies I had a very broad view on what had been offered to us by Japan.
The russian dub was... well, from terrible to very decent. For example, Hi No To Ri and Nausicaa were dubbed, imo, better than their official DVD releases today.
This is probably why a distaste for "new stuff" started to slowly grow on me before I even hit 20, because when you watch fucking Bubblegum Crisis or Zeiram, and then watch Evangelion when it happens, your view of what is really cool hurts your perception of new. So I already was a snob even before CD era, and cried the decline when harem echi became the most watchable anime between my friends.
I actually started to try and "cure" my schoolmates from sailor moon phobia and later, from just bad taste, by passing my tapes to them, oh, the lolz from their parents and teachers later.
Oh, and then FIDO happened. I believe my father used it to contact old animu fans. When I got my 56K, which was around Diablo 2 release, I started to spend my lunch money by buying anime. I contacted pirates and met them at subway stations or on markets and asked them to make VHCes for me with stuff they did't have at their regular stock, for example. I bought things like Evangelion, Escaflowne and Outlaw Star that way. That's late 90's-2000.
2003 and later it's already legal distribution.