Originally Posted by
AN2 Driver
Don't forget they have a huge territory of their own to cover plus some other states which still allow them in and also have not cancelled their airworthiness certificates. So first of all they will need to assure domestic travel which they appear to be doing. And before the end of the cold war the situation was pretty much like that, they only had Soviet airliners and flew them all over the world. Right now they will be restricted to fly them within their borders and whoever accepts them, but they will continue flying those.
I am not sure how many TU154's e.t.c. have actually been scrapped or are simply in "storage" of some form. Same goes for IL86's. Reactivating them may take some time but should be possible.
During the times of USSR there was no commercial airlines there. It was all state aviation. So the issue of cost never came into play (and those TU154s were not quite as far behind in terms of "state of the art"). Even if they could be dug up and revived (which I seriously doubt), flying those things would be prohibitively expensive. Unless, of course, Russian government scraps whatever clepto-capitalism they've built and just goes full on government ran economy (but I doubt that). So no, they will not be flying any of the old Soviet junk. Something like the current situation in Iran is more likely.