Yes, a communication with Samara has been established! I wrote in a previous post how guys from the Russian city of Samara (located in the Volga river region) teamed up to build a replica of the famous Polikarpov-2 biplane.
Valentin, a head of an aeronautical engineering firm named ‘AeroSamara’ - the one of a bunch in the city, - has replied to me by e-mail. They are busy, they are working on an array of projects, - however, there’s a group of co-workers that still, at their leisure time, take pleasure of building almost an authentic copy of the legendary ‘kukuruznik‘.
I got this picture from their on-line source, though it was taken a while ago, and Valentin wrote me the plane looks now far more competed than it was at the time of taking the picture, and that they’ve already made an engine test run. The engine is an original five cylinder M-11 (”greased all over”, - as they say in comments 
). A propeller, pictured above, is an original piece too, “made in 1945″.
At the beginning of work they passed around a word that they would accept any kind of assistance, ‘of material nature, or not’, and people are responding nicely: ‘tipping’ them with information, like “a so-and-so part been spotted at a so-and-so place”, etc. That’s how they got fuel tanks, wheels (”almost new”), and a rudder pedal post.
As they say, “a new-built plane is going to be wrapped around” a few original details, like this rudder pedal post, sent over to them by a gentleman from a rural area in Saratov region.
Once I used a term ‘Samara General Aviation Phenomenon‘ describing what was happening in the region, after the majority of the production plants, research and development centers, educational institutions belonging to the humongous ‘Soviet Aviaprom‘ in Samara city and around, were virtually paralyzed during the ‘Perestroika’, and for a few more years afterward. A process of dismantling the communism economy had a tremendous impact on the whole society. It was a very hard time for people working in the industry. However, it was there and then, that the ‘Samara General Aviation Phenomenon‘ took off. Numerous ‘embryos’ of the future business entities (like ‘AeroSamara’) on the field of emerging General Aviation market started to ‘hatch’ around entreprenaul groups made up of talent wasted in mass by the yet state-run ‘Aviaprom’.
Of course, the Po-2 project is just a sort of hobby a group of people in the firm take up on their off hours. As for the main stream of their business, they do aeronautical research and design, they build recreational airplanes made of composite, - in fact, they do everything ‘to make a buck’ nowadays. Now they are pretty close to finish construction of the wind tunnel that could be used in a few ways, including the parachute jump training.
I’ll be keeping in touch with these industrious folks to see what the next thing they are going to come up with. Hopefully, it won’t to be a ‘garage-based setup for the ballistic missile mass production
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