I stumbled upon this post and remembered a story I had read in a Soviet car magazine 15 or so years ago. There was then (and maybe still is) a “motorcycle wall of death” show somewhere in Moscow, or maybe Leningrad. I seem to recall it was in Moscow’s biggest amusement park called Gorky Park (which was a pretty boring, Soviet-style place when I was there in 2000), but don’t take me at my word.
The magazine’s reporter watched the show and was surprised to see that the motorcycles used by the performers (in the 1990s) were a couple of 1928 Indians – hard tail, leaf-spring fork and all.
It turned out that the bikes, along with the walls themselves, had been brought to Soviet Russia in the 1930s by two terribly misguided Americans who thought it would be a great business idea to bring their show to the working people’s paradise. They were promptly executed as spies, their bikes and all other equipment were confiscated, and the Russians ran the show for at least 55-60 years after that, using the original bikes all that time.