Memories of the 2003 NPP

An article about post-Soviet research institutes awakened in me memories of my short career in a not-so-secret Scientific Production Enterprise.

Apparently, then petrodollars really went into science and three vacancies suddenly opened up for a Junior Researcher at an almost empty enterprise. One took the director's son, as usual. The second was a graduate student from Leningrad State University who had recently completed his defense in wavelets and was eager to use them everywhere. I came last.

Imagine a huge five-story building. Long corridors in the middle of each floor, giant offices on the sides, windows covered with thin paper at the top of the walls between the corridor and the offices. This is what any research institute looked like in any Soviet film. Except that the interior windows in the cinema are clean and transparent and emit a warm light. It takes at least 15 minutes to walk from one end of the corridor to the other.

And all this is completely empty.

Besides us, the MNS, there were two engineers in the building in an office filled with bookcases beyond the limits, which for some reason was considered a work room. They didn't come out of it at all. It seems even to the toilet. They also smoked there, which was strictly prohibited, so the air there was practically unsuitable for breathing. There was also a director and his deputy in the first department. They sat in the “director’s office,” where there were two tables and a radio. The director read books and listened to the radio, and the first separator drank.

The secretary was sitting in a small room nearby. Quite by chance she turned out to be the director's wife. She drank tea all the time. With cookies. Hungry mothers loved her very much and came to eat cookies and watch her type out documents. It was interesting to watch, because before that I had seen typewriters only in the windows of hipster coffee shops, and to see a person typing text on a typewriter (it’s worth noting that it was electronic) page after page, without typos or errors in the rhythm of probably 300 characters per minute, was a miracle. The year was 2003.

The heart of the entire NPP was the chief (also the only) accountant. He was the only employee with a separate office, which contained a computer, printer and copier that stood out from the interior. The accountant was always sleek, laughed loudly and dressed in expensive suits. I think it was his talents for manipulating budgets that kept the entire NPP going.

To get to the territory you had to go through the entrance of the defense plant and you had to arrive strictly on time. But apart from the security guard in the booth, I did not see a single employee of that plant. Perhaps it was abandoned even more than its sister research and development enterprise.

Everything else was empty. Around the offices there were drawing boards with unfinished drawings, cabinets with calendars for the year 1993 on the doors, lopsided under the weight of paper documents on the shelves. New Year's decorations made from punched cards were especially memorable in the middle of a hot summer. There were almost no chairs in the offices. Perhaps they gave out the last salary in 1993.

The ministers, burning with inappropriate enthusiasm, signed up for an important federal project. But suddenly it turned out that the technical specifications for the project were classified as classified, and that even the third form was not enough to read it. The director read the technical specification and for two hours tried to retell it to the juniors in his own words. They liked the project, but they couldn’t remember it. Then the director waved his hand and gave them the technical specifications “to read.” They quickly found only a few relevant pages with frequency ranges and various decibels. Being millennials at heart, it never occurred to them to copy the signs into their notebooks. Instead, they went to the accounting department and began to photocopy the secret technical specifications.

The sound of a working copier woke up the head of the first department, who was drinking behind the wall. He was sober enough to see the stamp on the cover sticking out from under the copier cover. The next three hours are the source of my respect for everyone in the Navy. The former “admiral” yelled obscenities at the ministers until the end of the working day. And then he took the technical specifications. And a copy.

A week later, the research fellows had ready the drawings of a simple signal capture board, and the graduate student had already written half a program for signal processing using wavelet transforms. Of course, in Delphi. At this moment, the chief accountant said that funding for the project was not yet available (it was already circulating somewhere) and could we assemble a model from what was lying around the NPP cabinets? And we did it! We put together something terrible (hand soldering, hanging wires) while talking about hundreds of megahertz. But to our surprise, it worked for the lowest frequency. Although, to be honest, in the region of 100 Hz you still have to manage not to make money.

Naive nurses demonstrated a shocking result – a small hump on the wavelet spectrum to the director of the Scientific and Production Enterprise. The director was skeptical and the ministers promised to do better if they were allowed to order a printed circuit board at the factory (and manually solder the loose parts while talking about gigahertz) and they even found that it costs 3 thousand rubles (100 bucks, half the monthly salary of the minister). But the accountant was adamant.

The project stopped there, but the ministers did not sit idle. I am still delighted with the monograph on integrated optics found in one of the smoky cabinets in the engineers' closet. And the graduate student dragged the StarCraft disk through the entrance.

On one memorable day, engineers finished testing a certain device. Considering that the device was acoustic, and not a sound was heard from the engineers’ closet, the entire verification most likely consisted of spraying a noble layer of nicotine. The device had to be delivered to subcontractors across half the city yesterday, but there was no transport. Then the director rummaged through the cabinets opposite his office and pulled out a canvas backpack-bun. The trusted secret device was placed in a backpack, and the backpack was placed on the back of the minister, that is, me. And I went on foot to the subcontractors, only about an hour and a half on foot. Since documentation was attached to the device, the minister saw the face value of the secret device and along the way he mentally calculated how many years of his salary fit into this figure. And is it possible to work that much before retirement? And what will happen to the minister if he slips or runs into the gopniks? Or a spy who will tempt you with untold riches in order to install a bug, and the Minister will proudly refuse. Mns was 20 years old. Fortunately, nothing like this happened and I am sure that subsequently a secret sealed box with the device was installed in one of the high offices, paying to the last penny for strict control and accounting at every stage of production.

The deadline for the first stage of the project was approaching, and financing was still “not available.” The graduate student was given a third form of admission and sent to write a report. The gem of the report was a test image printed and scanned several times, on which the graduate student tested his transformations. In the report, the test image was the result of signal capture from the breadboard, of course.

Finally, realizing that this would continue to happen, I decided to go to where the real work was in full swing. And he went to work as an engineer at a factory. The junior minister was not very smart.

But that's a completely different story.