Text of Lyle Kruse's Presentation
Privet!................pozhalovat'
That was very poor Russian for hello, welcome, and how are you? I’ll spend
the next few minutes relating some stories about the Russian country, people
and some changes that have occurred since the early nineties.
If I were giving this talk in Russian, I would be nearly half done based on
the amount of Russian I know. In my 14 trips to Russia I picked up only
enough of the language to enable me to be polite and to ask for critical items
such as peeva. (Russian for beer). One of the small towns we frequented
produced a new batch of peeva each Tuesday. This stuff was non-pasteurized
and, at 30 proof, was really great if consumed by Wednesday. Things were
growing inside the bottles by Friday however.
Shortly after the Berlin wall fell, United States Senators Sam Nunn and
Richard Lugar sponsored legislation calling for U.S. - Russian cooperative
programs to insure safety and security across a wide spectrum of needs
relating to the former Soviet Union nuclear weapons programs. I had the
privilege of leading one of the first of those programs which provided for
high security rail transportation of nuclear weapons from Russian military
sites to central sites for dismantlement of the weapons. The project lasted
for 10 years and gave me the opportunity to see most of Russia from Saint
Petersburg down to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea.
We worked directly with the Russian Ministry of defense (MOD) and the
Ministry of Atomic Energy. Our Russian military counterparts were headed
by 3-star general Vladimir Yakovlev with project lead given to a Colonel
Andrei Kokurin. The technical lead for the Ministry of Atomic Energy was
German Smirnoff. Yakovlev and Smirnoff certainly represented two of the
well established families of the same name but even Col Kokurin’s father
achieved fame as a well respected test pilot during WWII and Col Kokurin’s
wife was personal secretary to Boris Yeltsin.
When we first started traveling to Russia the exchange rate was two dollars
for one Ruble. By the third trip the exchange rate was 20 rules per dollar at
beginning of the week and 1000 rubles per dollar at end of week. At that rate
a Big Mac required two fists full of Rubles. Of course no visit to Moscow is
complete unless you visit McDonald’s restaurant in Pushkin square. The Pushkin
Square McDonald’s was the first in Moscow and is still the most famous although
there are McDonald’s all over the city now. Prior to the soviet collapse, the
Russians were told that ground beef was detrimental to their health. They
certainly don’t believe that now, and even with the collapse if the Ruble, the
place always had long lines. There are guards at the door to insure only 100
people at a time are allowed into the restaurant and you are required to exit
immediately for the next wave as soon as you received your order. You cannot
eat inside the restaurant.
The other famous square across town in Moscow is Lubyanska square. Lubyanskya
square has the beautiful Bolshoi ballet building on one side and the old KGB
building on the other. The KGB building is only 4 stories above ground and the
two infamous floors in the basement. Russians still joke however, that it is
the tallest building in Moscow since you could see all the way to Siberia if
you ever found yourself in the basement rooms.
I expect my nieces, nephews, and grandkids thought I was working on a project
to liberate Matrishka dolls instead of nuclear weapon dismantlement. Matrishkas
are the famous stacking dolls most often in the form of Russian princesses so
naturally the nieces and granddaughters loved them. Didn’t take Russian
inventiveness long however to expand into other areas so all the nephews and
grandsons got Matrishka dolls of their favorite NFL or NBA teams. There was
even Clinton family Matrishkas that included Monica Lewinsky.
Negotiations finally ended in a formal agreement whereby the US would design
nuclear safety and security modifications for 120 special railcars and 10
special command cars for trains to move nuclear weapons to dismantlement
facilities. The US provided the design and all materials necessary for the
modification as well as developing the prototype using an actual railcar
shipped to the US. The Russians provided labor for conversion of all remaining
cars following acceptance of the US design and prototype. Rail was chosen since
it is the primary mode of transportation in Russia and all military sites have
rail connection. There are very few highways and those that do exist are poor
by any standard. The rail system is extensive and their railcars often have an
interesting basic security design of their own. The average citizen cannot tell
by looking at a railcar if it contains grain, potatoes, vodka, or weapons. The
cars we chose to modify were nearly 90 foot long and initially designed to transport
Russian Missiles. Each car had a large platform that would move out of double rear
doors to facilitate loading of a missile. Those platforms were engineered like a
Swiss watch in terms of how the movement mechanism worked. The exterior of the cars
had sets of doors on each end and each side. All of the doors were fake except the
platform doors at the rear.
The railcar factory chosen to complete the design was located on the main highway
halfway between Moscow and St Petersburg in the town of Tver (formerly Kaliningrad).
The highway between Moscow and St Petersburg is one of the few but also one of the
best highways in Russia. During summer months it is a three lane undivided highway
where you can venture into the center lane to pass someone in your lane if you are
bold enough to do so. Near the end of the winter months, the highway chokes down to
one lane since the snow plows simply push accumulated snow and wrecked vehicles into
piles beside the road.
Most of our travel to Tver was on this highway in various buses provided either by
the MOD or the railcar factory. During the first few years, travel was accomplished
under the old soviet rules where you needed a specific visa to travel from one region
to another. The Old Russian regions are slightly larger than a county in the US and
ordinary citizens needed special permission to travel to any region other than their
home region. Analogous to needing a Visa for travel to Omaha if you were born in
Lincoln.
We were always accompanied by our full Russian Military counterparts who helped get
us through the checkpoints at each region since our visas were not issued for multi
region travel. At each region boundary, General Yakovlev would get off the bus and
enter into conversation with the local checkpoint police. After a few minutes
conversation, he would give the local police a few bottles of vodka and then re-board
the bus. He would smile and say “no-problem” which became one of his favorite English
phrases. Bus travel would resume but typically stop about every few hours for a shot
of Vodka that was chased with Russian sausage. We soon learned the concept of
“Chewt-Chewt” which means “only a small shot of vodka that was to be consumed in one
gulp”. The small amount consisted of one twelve ounce water glass filled about halfway
and given to each person in turn who consumed the vodka; the glass was re-filled and
passed on to the next person.
The majority of the highway was rural in nature although during one of the “Chewt-Chewt”
stops there appeared to be a monastery on a nearby hillside. I asked if we could look
around and we found the monastery to actually be a small farming village on the river
bank. At the entrance to the village we found a small church and a young orthodox priest
who had arrived a few months earlier with the mission of restoring the church. As it
turns out, the entire church had been carefully dismantled and buried through out the
village before the Bolsheviks could destroy it and the community continued to worship
in secret during the soviet years. A good deal of the restoration had already been
completed by the young priest including the ornate altar, and most of the religious
icons. He was quite happy to receive contributions to his efforts as we left.
One of our accommodations in Tver was at a place that literally translated to
“Hotel-Motel” in English and although it was an up-scale hotel for the region, the
$1.50 a night in US dollars was way overpriced. The second trip to Tver occurred about
two months later giving the locals time to obtain copies of the official US per-diem
allowance for Russian travel and so the “Hotel-Motel” cost changed to $195.00 per night.
Getting a Russian railcar to Albuquerque for prototype design proved interesting. As
many of you know, the Russians purposely designed their rail system to be incompatible
with the rest of Europe so that any invading country would have difficulty using that
infrastructure. We modified US rail wheel and truck assemblies so we could drop the
Russian car onto American wheels and move around on our rails. The car was shipped to
Houston without wheels and offloaded using a 200 ton floating crane. Originally we
thought we would move it by rail to our facilities in Albuquerque but there were four
separate US rail companies between Houston and Albuquerque whose lawyers got together
and could not agree on where each company would hand off the car to the next company or
who was responsible for what along the line. So much for lawyers. - If it wasn’t for
layers, we wouldn’t need them.
We finally scrapped the idea of using US rails and hired a private trucker who allowed
us to weld the railcar to his lowboy flatbed. Being oversized, the US DOT gave us a
route that avoided overpasses and underpasses and eventually used a combination of 25 US
and state highways and two farmers’ fields to get to Albuquerque.
Work began on the prototype and also allowed for periodic progress visits by the Russian
delegation to Albuquerque. During an early visit, a member of the Russian delegation
asked to go to a store and purchase some aspirin. Aspirin and soap were in short supply
in Russia. When the group entered a nearby supermarket, several could not believe such a
store was real since it was so different from their own. A quick-thinking interpreter
got out a copy of the yellow pages and asked members of the group to select other
supermarkets at random and after visiting four of the selections; they finally believed
that these stores existed. The Russian stores at this time were still operating as state
stores. Russian stores were mostly empty. You would stand in long lines to get to the stock
counter and perhaps find one sausage and a few pairs of shoes. If you wanted the sausage,
you would get a slip of paper from the clerk when you got the front of the line and then
get into another long line to pay the amount listed on the paper. After that you would get
into another line so you could redeem the cashier sheet for your sausage. By this time the
sausage was almost always gone and the store was closing so you would need to repeat the
process the next day since the price would almost always change overnight.
During Russian visits to the US we would often entertain the Russians in our homes although
we were not invited to theirs. Col Koukurin asked several times prior to his visits how
many rooms our houses had and wanted a description of each room. Koukurin had made colonel
at a young age and may have been in line for BG after completion of the Railcar project.
His rank allowed him and his family to have a two bedroom apartment.
During prototype construction we fabricated kits of materials required to complete
modification of remaining cars in Russia and shipped them to Tver. The railcar prototype
was also shipped back to Russia for the final acceptance testing of the system. Our Prototype,
two other cargo cars modified from US kits in Russia, and a US designed System Command car
were hooked together along with two sleeping cars and a dining car. We traveled the Russian
rails on that special train nearly three weeks as a test of all of the design features as
well as ability to operate in the rail environment.
Return of the prototype was delayed slightly because of the attacks on the Russian white
house. We delayed our travel plans and arranged to arrive in St Petersburg to accept the car
from the ship and then proceed to Tver to start the three week trip. Those delays also meant
that we could not get to Tver as originally planned but special arrangements were made to take
the midnight train between St Petersburg and Moscow. It does not normally stop at Tver but in
our case, it stopped for five minutes so we could disembark. The State department always provided
cautionary information prior to each trip and our Russian counterparts also informed us that the
midnight train had a history of compartment thefts nearly every night. We wired our compartment
shut using cut-up coat hangers and had no problem. At Tver, we cut the coat hangers, hopped off
the midnight train, got a few hours sleep and then proceeded to the railcar factory to start the
3 week shakedown trip. There were 5 of us from the US, two of General Yakovlev’s personal
bodyguards for our protection, three technicians from the railcar factory, and one other Russian
we had not seen before. The unknown Russian quickly earned the nickname of Igor among the US team.
The entire Russian delegation, in addition to those traveling on the train, was very quiet and
concerned when we arrived at Tver. Turns out, they had just tried to turn the system on for the
first time prior to our arrival and it did not work. Further delays were out of the question
since the time on the rails had been scheduled so we started off with nothing working. Our
departure seemed very bothersome for the Russian technicians with us and you could see considerable
worry in their expressions. Our perspective was different from the Russians in that experience
shows most complicated systems like this, usually have a few unexpected bugs regardless of care in
design and testing,. There was nothing for us to do except make the most of the next three weeks to
figure out what was wrong.
During movement of the train, personnel had access to all railcars except the cargo cars for
safety reasons. While underway we planned specific troubleshooting tasks in the cargo cars for
everyone to perform when the train stopped. These stops were usually limited to 30 to 45 minutes
to clear problems on the tracks and other stops because the rail system was still being run in the
old Soviet fashion. Each region in the Soviet Union had their own train engines and was required
to pull trains across their region where they would uncouple their engine and hand the train over
to jurisdiction of the next region.
The Russian team and US team had different dining hours since the dining car was not very large.
It was exquisite in its hand carved wood decorations and luxurious décor. It was an East German
car confiscated after WWII. After dinner, we would meet the three Russian technications in the dining
car each evening for a few drinks and to review the day’s test results to determine what was wrong.
The Russian technicians were hard workers and technically very sharp but they were concerned that
their jobs and livelihood depended on success and perhaps they would be stripped of their jobs and
apartments when we returned from the trip.
Initial tests had started to uncover wiring errors and after the second day it became obvious why
they had happened. Those of you who have worked construction jobs are probably familiar with different
types of drawings and how preliminary drawings are always stamped with warnings not to be used for
construction. Not until final design and the final drawing package is there a CFC stamp to designate
certified for construction. There had been a major wiring change in the design just prior release of
the CFC drawings and we found that the railcars were wired backwards. Management at the railcar factory
kept the CFC drawings in a safe because they did not want them to get damaged if used on the production
floor. With that knowledge, we were able to re-wire over the next few days and had nearly two and a half
weeks of successful operation. We still spent many nights in the dining car convincing the
techniciations that the problems were not their fault and that we were going to personally see to it
that they received official commendation from the US government through the Russian government to the
railcar factory for their excellent abilities and help.
The US team had to pass from their sleeping car through the Russian sleeping car to reach the dining car.
Each time we did that, Igor would try to invite us into his compartment to drink vodka and eat dried fish.
A friendly invite but we struggled throughout trip with the Russian and English language to thank him for
his hospitality while turning him down. That ritual continued for the entire first half of the trip with
Igor always speaking in Russian and looking confused at our interpreter’s explanations.
Our turnaround point was the city of Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. We had started our trip in waist deep
snow in Tver and turned around in 95 degree 90% humidity. The turnaround lasted for a full day so we went
into town and hired a driver with a van to do some quick sightseeing. The driver was quite proud to show
us a beautiful orthodox cathedral in downtown Astrakhan that had been gutted by the Bolsheviks and still
remains as the town’s bus station. When we returned to the train, I noticed some interesting railcars
parked nearby on another track. These cars were similar to the system command cars we modified except
they had lots of antennas on them and very sophisticated wheel and suspension systems. I had to get a
picture of those cars so I crouched next to our train and was shooting pictures. All of a sudden there
was a huge hand on my right shoulder. It was Igor. In perfect Midwestern US English with absolutely no
Russian accent, he informed me that there were knowledgeable Russian rail experts on our train and that
any questions I had could be answered by them so that pictures were not necessary. I’m not sure what
happened but Igor was not on the train for the return trip.
Official acceptance papers were signed at the end of the trip and our subsequent visits through the
year 2004 were for inspection trips and verification of use. Each trip saw noticeable changes in the
Russian economy and our Russian project team. The project remains as one of the most successful of the
joint cooperative program.
In the beginning, we always felt comfortable and safe wandering the streets at any hour of the day or
even alone if necessary. Later-on it was best not venture out alone or at late hours in certain parts
of the city as crime began to rise.
The younger generation seems to be embracing free enterprise but many of the older generation are
noticeably lost. There are new upscale stores emerging and are filled with merchandise and food. There
is still much progress to be made but it does seem to be occurring in rapid spurts and the Ruble is
stabilizing.
An image familiar to all of us is that of the military parades through Red Square in front of the Kremlin.
Red Square is still intact above ground but the entire area under the north end has been excavated and an
upscale shopping center built that rivals that of the Atlanta underground. There are enough US restaurant
and merchandise franchises that it is easy to believe you are somewhere in the US.
It is also interesting that inside the Kremlin, the museums, housing, and Cathedral Square were untouched
by the Bolsheviks. The 5 cathedrals in the square remain as they were for hundreds of years.
Finally, a closing note about The Russian project team. As mentioned, we believed Col Kokurin would be in
line for his BG star because of his rapid rise through the ranks but we learned he chose to leave the
military and formed a transportation guarantee company. If you needed to move freight through out Russia,
you simply pay his company for expedited and guaranteed safe arrival.
With that, I’ll say Spasiba, Dobroy nochi! and Vsego nailuchshego.
Thank you, good night, and all the best to each of you.