Alexander Trukhanov - co-author of the books “And I Was in a Computer City” and “Professor Fortran's Encyclopedia” - talked with his acquaintance, now a businessman, Konstantin Smirnov about the import of foreign computers into the USSR: about a hole in the Iron Curtain, about a German smuggler baron and a British lumpen adventurer.
After an interview where COCOM's restrictions on technology imports to Eastern Bloc countries were mentioned , an old friend of mine pointed out a couple of inaccuracies via Facebook. First, according to the classics of Marxism-Leninism, the capitalist will commit any crime if it promises a profit not 100%, but 300% (we immediately corrected this in the text). Secondly, bypassing the restrictions, prohibited ingredients in the USSR were supplied not only by Indians. Konstantin Smirnov - this is the name of my acquaintance - said that he was familiar with at least two more similar characters: the German baron and the British lumpen, and is ready to tell about them.
Previously, we talked mainly about off-road driving, which we both are fond of: Kostya either climbs Elbrus in an SUV, or drives across the ice of Lake Baikal. And then it suddenly turned out that the times of KOCOM left a rather deep mark in the life of each of us. Phoned, met. We settled down on the veranda of Kostya's country house and started a conversation over a cup of strong coffee.
I presented Konstantin with the rare "Encyclopedia of Professor Fortran" and told him about a humorous reproach from one of the readers: he dreamed of becoming an astronaut as a child, and after reading the book he became a programmer. It turns out that Professor Fortran broke a person's life, did not let him go to the stars.
Konstantin Smirnov:My whole family is rocket and space, with the exception of my grandmother, a pharmacist. After graduating from Phystech in 1988, I remained in graduate school and also managed to work in space. We dealt with high-frequency pressure pulsations during cavitation in turbopump units. If you explain on the fingers of the humanities, the processes of the formation of bubbles in fluid liquids were investigated. These very bubbles collapse under certain circumstances, causing a local water hammer. A similar phenomenon has sometimes been observed in rocket fuel pumps, destroying an expensive item. In addition to space, similar research was carried out by shipbuilders, because cavitation leads to damage to propellers. But there this very cavitation is not only harmful, but sometimes useful, for example, in the design of torpedoes. By the way,films often show a spectacular train of bubbles from torpedoes and submarines. Viewers mistakenly think they have air in them. I will reveal a secret: there are no air bubbles at all - there is cold water vapor.
The first year of graduate school was the most enchanting time in my life: at the institute you can say that I am on an experimental base, on the basis of saying that at the institute ... and go about your business. A postgraduate scholarship of 135 rubles, plus a part-time laboratory assistant at 55. It turned out for one hundred and eighty - at that time, very few earned that much after graduation. Moreover, there was no control - complete freedom, although I worked quite intensively.
Konstantin Smirnov (center) awaiting diploma, 1988
At the experimental stand, we had an ES-1060 computer, which, besides me, few people were interested in. Two big-headed old men-scientists got used to working the old-fashioned way, and the rest of the scientific plankton living in pants and skirts, this computer was generally up to the lantern: they drank tea, knitted, waited for dinner and ran quietly to the shops. Appeared young and inquisitive - great - and put him on a computer. They planted, and I began to process the experimental data. Then personal computers appeared, and it was obvious that computerization was imposed by an order from above. The people at the institute took the initiative without much enthusiasm and the development of new technology was pushed onto the students and graduate students. So I plunged into the world of computer technology.
Alexander Trukhanov:Whose staff at your institute were, Polish or Hungarian? In the days of the CMEA - the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance - they tried to collect terminals even in Cuba in order to keep the local population busy. I personally saw this and pressed the buttons on it.
KS: The Hungarians had a strong position in our market. I had an older friend in a tourist get-together, with whom I rafted along the rivers. He was listed as an employee of the UPDK - the Office for the Service of the Diplomatic Corps. Through this UPDK Hungarian "Videoton" on outsourcing terms hired engineers in our country. They paid some absolutely fantastic for those times salaries of 400 rubles, although the work was worn out with constant business trips.
A. T .:400 rubles with an average salary of an engineer in the country of 120 rubles? Cool! When I graduated from MEPhI, such a crazy salary was lured into the position of a programmer in the computing center of the Orthodox Church in Zagorsk. How much they actually paid remained a secret - no one went there from our course. There is secrecy, the financial sphere and the need to work without the right of dismissal for at least three years. And about the Hungarians there were rumors that they went to Austria with their suitcases along the bridge across the river to get components for assembling personal computers.
"What really fascinated me then." Central Asia, Chong-Kemin river. Konstantin Smirnov on the nose on the left. 1986
KS: Big money is always paid not just like that, but for something. I readily believe in walking across the bridge for components, knowing the realities of that time.
A. T .: Kostya, I still don't understand why you left science. He studied in graduate school, at least the candidate, probably passed. And suddenly he dropped everything. Why did this happen because of the great love for computers?
K. S .:I not only passed the minimum. My dissertation was half finished, only the details remained in the design. Nevertheless, three months before the defense, I filed a letter of resignation, and quite deliberately. For the first time, I thought about my place in this world a year after entering graduate school. At night in a dream he asked himself the question: "Can I succeed as a scientist?" Here are my micro- and macro-chefs, elderly (as it seemed to me then) "tadpoles", as scientists took place. If you wake them up at night and ask what they are thinking, the answer will be obvious - about hydrodynamics. What's in my head? Camping, girls ... You have to either be obsessed, like my chiefs, or become a scientific plankton and sit in the institute pants! I realized that I was not as fanatically committed as my "tadpoles."But that time, after agonizing thoughts, I made a courageous decision to stick my head in the sand and ignore my inner voice. A year has passed before the defense of everything, nothing. And here again a dream, and again an inner voice. Only now he is no longer appeased, does not want to be silent, but repeats, repeats and repeats: “Don't become plankton, don't become mediocre! Look for yourself! Take care of what your soul lies for! " The soul lay to computers. For three days I walked in an inverted mind, and then I went to the personnel department and wrote a statement.For three days I walked in an inverted mind, and then I went to the personnel department and wrote a statement.For three days I walked in an inverted mind, and then I went to the personnel department and wrote a statement.
A. T.: At the institute, everyone must have bulged out of surprise?
KS: They bulged out, of course, not understanding what was happening. But I was not the only newsmaker - at that time a lot of things began to happen in the country, which made the eyes of the people, accustomed to constancy, bulging.
A. T .: How was your knight's move at home?
KS: Mom, who worked with the first BESM, accepted my decision with understanding. But she warned me that in three or four years I would get bored with computers. And she was right, she was mistaken only for a year or two.
AT: You left graduate school, parted with a salary of 180 rubles. What did you live on? And when did a German baron and a British lumpen appear on your horizon?
K. S .:At that time, my acquaintances, under the leadership of that very senior friend, a water tourist who had already exchanged the UPDK with Videoton for free bread, stood under the flag of the MZhK - a youth housing cooperative. The guys quickly, as befits the pioneers of cooperation, forgot about their "housing" purpose and rushed into the state program for the computerization of the energy sector of the USSR. There was enough work. Thanks to them, on a contract basis, I began to install local networks of 10-15 personnel in the Nuclear Power Plant Construction Departments.
It was there that I ran into the business of a British counterfeit lumpen. It was, as I understand it now, an ordinary British vocational school, who was trained in commissioning work on large computers supplied to the USSR bypassing KOCOM. We then treated foreigners with a certain reverence. An ordinary English technician with a secondary education began to acquire connections. The guy quickly realized that he had stumbled upon a new Klondike: he could buy computers himself, and then resell them to the Land of Soviets along with the installation - an operation no more complicated than a scam with rotten eggs from the books of Jack London. It is only necessary to register the company away from the vigilant British justice, for example, in Cyprus, which he did.
Now he not only unrolled local grids, but also sold computers. It seems to have jumped from rags to riches, became a boss, but retained the mentality: instead of licensed Novell NetWare network software, the gentleman supplied pirated copies with self-made labels on floppy disks to the objects. We drew attention to this and forced to change the left assembly to the original. Replaced. But only one set of almost 30 left. At first, there were very few meticulous guys like us. This allowed the character to make money out of thin air and flourish for a while. Well, we got up on these jobs. We thought it would be like this forever, but alas - the list of objects in the portfolio of friends quickly ended, and I had to come up with something new.
A. T .:How did you meet the baron? I've heard about him too. In the research institute where I worked, there was a powerful (approximately like VAX) computer NORD by NORSK DATA. A familiar physicist, who counted the thickness of protection for spacecraft on it, once let slip that at one of the exhibitions he saw "the baron who brought us NORD through a hole in the iron curtain." According to stories, the German did not go out to the public from the stand, only peered cautiously from behind the ajar door of the meeting room with a glass of wine in hand.
K. S .:Yes, this is Harry, his demeanor - he was careful, he drank wine at exhibitions, but I never saw the baron drunk. Harry also had other peculiarities: during the negotiations he wrote down a lot, emphasized something sweepingly, giving the visitors the impression of a serious business partner. Then it turned out that all this is a cheap show. After one of such meetings, already in the role of his assistant, I saw Harry tearing out the sheets of paper covered with writing from a thick beautiful diary and throwing them into the trash bin as unnecessary. He constantly performed this trick in front of inexperienced Soviet customers.
There were even more serious techniques in the baron's arsenal - it turns out that he understood Russian, but he never showed it. I learned about Harry's carefully hidden knowledge of the Russian language only after six months of fairly close communication. And even then by accident. For six months he took me, his assistant, and everyone else by the nose! Harry's wife was Russian-speaking, but by no means Slavic in appearance. Apparently, he mastered the language with her help. By the way, Madame was peculiar with by no means European manners, which betrayed soviet roots in her. Another baron's trick was the rule never to say no. Instead, he used streamlined language like "will, then." It would be more correct to say "later, when the cancer whistles on the mountain." But Harry was delicately silent about cancer.
A. T: How did you meet the Baron?
« »
. .:I got to the baron through the guys from the same tourist get-together, with whom I rafted down mountain rivers on inflatable rafts. At that time, I was out of work, recently got married, and even my mother-in-law - honor and praise to her - managed to introduce me to one of the last Soviet housing cooperatives in Moscow. The parents covered half of the contribution. It was necessary to find the same amount, but there is no money. I agreed to do anything from assembling computers to installing windows. The hack turned up by chance: friends called and offered to Russify a batch of printers. One-time work, tedious, but well paid. So I got to the baron's office. By the way, I approached the process creatively: I optimized the workplace and the work algorithm so that there was not a single unnecessary movement. The scientific approach gave the result: the speed of work increased two and a half times.Working from dawn to dawn, in a week and a half, I reflashed the entire batch of printers in the warehouse, for which I received a weighty envelope - it was quite enough to cover the second half of the cooperative fee for a three-room apartment. Then there was a couple of similar hacks, after which the baron himself drew attention to the drummer of capitalist labor with a background in Physics and Technology. So I started working for a capitalist enterprise.
A. T: How did the baron come to such a life? In my opinion, every self-respecting aristocrat should have a castle and millions in Swiss accounts.
KS: I was not a member of the close circle of the baron's confidants. I contemplated what was happening from the gallery, but from the guys from the first row of the stalls I heard that Harry had a castle and an impeccable pedigree. But for some reason there was not enough money for the maintenance of the castle. Poor baron! So, everyday circumstances forced him to start a computer business that was new at that time.
At first, Harry focused on the supply of expensive and large VAX computers - graphics stations. The baron ignored the business of selling and assembling personal computers for a long time (the same amount of trouble, but less money) and overlooked, as it became clear later, a direction with colossal potential. The smuggling baron flourished for quite some time, but nothing lasts forever. The baron's business collapsed along with the great and mighty Soviet Union. Both the greed of the aristocrat himself and force majeure are to blame for the collapse.
The following happened: Harry was offered a large contract for as much as $ 5 million. The amount is not small even now, but at that time it was simply huge. The conditions are simple: chairs in the morning, that is, computers, money in the evening. Under the guarantees of the Soviet authorized banks, of course. The Baron signed the contract, shipped the computers and waited for payment from the USSR. Here the Soviet Union took over, and collapsed. The money remained in the Soviet, more precisely, in the Russian bank, and no one was going to transfer it to the baron. All sorts of "fixers" appeared, which at first for 10%, then for 30%, and later for half of the stuck amount, offered services to return it. The baron was stubborn: “Pay interest? For what? They have to pay me the money under the contract! " Then everything is as usual: “Should not mean obligated. USSR promised? Let the USSR, which no longer exists, pays you ... "
The Iron Curtain disappeared, and with it disappeared the money earned by the Baron by circumventing prohibitions and restrictions. Harry's computer business actually ended there. The projects with personal computers and Russified printers, in which I participated, were nothing more than an attempt by the baron to jump into the last car of the departing train. Sluggish, and therefore unsuccessful. I watched how, at the end of his career, Harry plunged headlong into the direction that was just beginning to develop in the Russian open spaces - building materials for "European-quality repair" (TM). At this stage, the baron disappeared from my field of vision and did not appear in him again. Except for one single episode: a couple of years after the crash in Russia, Harry undertook to bring us a decent batch of processors in his leather suitcase. After that, our roads with the baron no longer crossed.
Konstantin Smirnov during a trip to Las Vegas to the COMDEX computer exhibition - his first trip abroad. Hoover Dam, 1996
A. T .: Kostya, I have always wondered how the intelligence services treated smugglers on different sides of the Iron Curtain. Do you have an opinion on this?
K. S .:Thank God, I have never encountered the special services - neither my own nor strangers. I can only rely on common sense, information from colleagues and from open sources. I have no doubt that both the German baron and the British lumpen were studied up and down by the relevant Soviet authorities and passed a resolution, as in Vysotsky's song: "proven, our comrade." They checked and gave the go-ahead for business in the USSR. In the interests of increasing the country's defense capability, the earliest possible building of developed socialism, etc., etc. - I have already forgotten the rhetoric of that time. We opened the gate in the iron curtain on our side for the capitalist "comrades". It is clear that at any moment the gate could be slammed and the guilty's tails could be pinched.
A. T .:How did these two deal with problems on the other side of the curtain? The Indians who arrived in Britain were knitted right on the plane ladder for smuggling 386 processors into the USSR.
The earliest surviving photograph of Konstantin related to the computer business. "No longer in the basement", 1998
K. S .:I dealt only with technology and had nothing to do with the secrets of logistics. But people who watched what was happening from the front rows, over a bottle of tea, sometimes shared what they saw. According to their stories, the British lumpen in the Kingdom itself did not buy anything and did not do business there at all. The comrade registered a desk in Cyprus, and through it he worked. I didn’t plan to build a big business. He limited himself to milking the lured Union ministry, spinning it up to supply almost three dozen sets of network solutions with about 10-15 machines in each. He was inconspicuous, but greedy and unprincipled. When problems appeared with the operation of the network software, it was revealed that all the sent kits were not only copies, not originals, but also from a package already installed once - this assembly could not work correctly in principle. Mister apologized and sent the original. But,remember I said before: one in three dozen kits sold. You are smart, you can figure it out. On that and earned.
Unlike the British vocational school, the German baron worked for us for a long time and on a grand scale - the millionth contract was an ordinary event for him - but more carefully and sophisticated: he did not buy products for the USSR (in the 1980s he was engaged in large computers and graphic stations). Europe, and in the USA. Then, through his offices (according to rumors, he had at least five in different parts of the world) he sent goods by steamers to South Africa. Then the cargoes went to the north of the continent by trucks, and were again reloaded onto the steamers. In the end, computers, having repeatedly changed owners and nationalities, ended up behind the Iron Curtain on our side. Later, at the very beginning of the 1990s, when the baron tried to deal with personal computers, he acted not so sophisticated in terms of logistics, but ideologically the same way: transport companies arrived with computer cases,floppies and motherboards, and the baron personally brought memory chips, processors and hards wrapped in bubble wrap in huge leather suitcases. How the baron went through customs, from where, from what country he flew with weighty suitcases, history is silent, which is not surprising. Such were the times, such were the customs. In fairness, it should be noted that over the past two thousand years, mankind has not invented a single new sin. Everything is as old as the world, including contraband.that in the last two thousand years mankind has not invented a single new sin. Everything is as old as the world, including contraband.that in the last two thousand years mankind has not invented a single new sin. Everything is as old as the world, including contraband.
A. T .: Smugglers still offered Spartak a hidden transfer of soldiers by sea - the main thing is to pay for their services. But what other characters from the computer past do you remember?
K. S .:There was one funny gentleman. At the seminar of a company that had just appeared on the Russian market, AMD spoke English. I did not understand a word in Russian. Later, at the banquet, this Western representative slightly overdid it with vodka and, as he got drunk, began to switch to an explosive mixture of clearly native English with an equally clearly not native, but very decent and fluent Ukrainian. In my family tree, half are Ukrainians, so I willingly supported the conversation. In half an hour I already knew all the corporate and family secrets of the speaker: his grandfather ended up in England immediately after the war. But most of all of his revelations I remember one phrase in English-Ukrainian: "English people, they are so bad people, with advertisements - Pentium, Pentium ... For me four eighty six performance - hefty garna ..". I quit the computer business a long time ago, I work in another industry,but from time to time I remember this catch phrase.
At the exhibition. 2001
A. T .: The best is the enemy of the good, or, as system administrators used to say at the dawn of computer networks: “Don't try to improve what works. You can't do it better, you just break it. "
K. S .:Regarding "you can't do better ...": reliable Western technologies in our realities sometimes fail for reasons that their developers cannot even think of. Here's an example: one customer regularly sent us complaints about keyboards that we supplied them. At first, we silently changed them to the same new ones. Then they began to change to super-reliable, withstanding an incredible number of clicks. They return anyway. They began to understand. They opened the cases of keyboards, and there - crushed cockroaches in an incredible amount !!! In our country, it is easier for a customer to hit a supplier of equipment than to remove cockroaches from objects. We launch satellites, build nuclear power plants and icebreakers, but we cannot deal with cockroaches at facilities. In fairness, I notethat the object was quite specific - a network of currency exchangers with an unclear status in the subway passages. Well, how can it be without cockroaches.
Escorting me, Konstantin said that long before our meeting he had tried to find on the net at least some mentions of the smuggler baron and the British lumpen. But the Internet about them and their companies is empty, even rolling. Nothing survived, which, however, is not surprising - after all, everything that was told happened long before the advent of the Internet and affected only "a narrow circle of limited people." And if somewhere that has survived, mere mortals have no access there. Maybe it's for the better: you know less, sleep better. Otherwise, it will happen as in Konstantin's story: in the middle of the night it will wake up an inner voice and begin to cut the truth, so you have to change your job. Well, if only work, or even your whole life, you have to change.