Encryption/data-changing in russia

Dear All, whilst on the subject of PGP in Russia, I encountered something very interesting. A friend of mine who is Russian, but lives out here, frequently corresponds with friends in Russia via email, and in the course of sending emai, they occasionally send an attachment. However, the attachment that _all_ his russian friends send, including the ones who use MIME capable email clients such as Eudora, always, _always_, uuencode files, and they say they can't do MIME. I am wondering if the encryption/data-changing laws in Russia are so strict as to disallow MIME encoding even, but still allows UU for some reason? Any clues as to this? Yours Sincerely, Benjamin Grosman