It's a while since I've read "Fountain's of paradise", but I seem to recall that the main structural material used was non-metallic, I think form of ultra-high-tech carbon fibre.
Samara University by the way is a very real and serious aerospace university - in the soviet days it trained most of the Engineers for Tupolev and the progress rocket plant, amongst others. Samara (previously known as Kyubychev) was where much of the Soviet high technology and aerospace industry was moved by Stalin as the Germans started to threaten the main Russian industrial heartland around 1943. I studied there briefly about a dozen years ago, and learned ten times as much in a few weeks about microsatellite design (my main interest at the time) as I had in several years studying astronautics at a British university.
Then, realising that nobody was ever going to offer me a ride in one, I switched to aeroplanes...
G