Tag Archives: soviet union

What’s the most pointless work I’ve done?

In the 1980s the Soviets used to buy factories, lock, stock and barrel, from the West, particularly from Finland. They would buy the walls, the ceiling, the machines, the lifts, the windows, the storage crates, the kitchen, everything, with one big contract.

‘Everything’ also included the software to run the factory and, of course, the computers to run the software. And that’s how I found myself in Zelenograd, 40 km from Moscow, in the Autumn of 1988.

The MRP system I was implementing in Hungary, was the final tick in the final box that completed the contract and triggered payment to the Finns for an entire floppy-disk unit factory.

Zelenograd was then the ‘silicon valley’ of Russia, though its shabbiness suggested ‘silicon wasteland’. Wikipedia says ‘Before 1989 Zelenograd was a de facto closed city in some aspects: it was prohibited to take photos in the central parts of the city, near the plants, teaching and research facilities, and foreigners were not admitted into the city.’ But that’s not true. I was there.

zelenograd

The problem the Finns faced was that they couldn’t find a system that could easily be sold to the Soviet Union (export rules being what they were in those days). Unless they delivered a system they wouldn’t get paid. But because our MRP system had already been sold to Soviet-bloc Hungary, it qualified. (There were no packaged MRP systems native to the Soviet bloc at that time.)

It was actually a fascinating project, and when we won the order I approached the project with enthusiasm. Not only did we have to adapt the software to deal with overlapping manufacturing processes, but we also had to provide an interface to clever (Finnish) shop-floor reporting devices placed next to each of the machines involved in the process. The machine operators would report  completion of each stage of the manufacturing process using these devices.

The Finns appeared to be grateful for my enthusiasm and in due course, after we’d trained the factory’s staff and finished all the adaptations, the final box in the contract was ticked. The Finns got paid and we got paid. And that appeared to be the end of the matter.

We went out to a very smart Moscow restaurant to celebrate.

So, when do we start loading real data into the system?’ I asked.

‘We’ll let you know,’ they said. ‘But probably not immediately.’

Of course, the system was never actually used, and I realised, as we celebrated, that it was never intended to be used. Even the clever shop-floor reporting devices were empty of their components, long since ransacked by the factory’s electricians for domestic use.  And in any case the five-inch floppy disk units were already obsolete. Perhaps even the factory was never used. I never heard anything more about it. But I’m sure it made some people wealthy, and I don’t just mean the Finns. That’s how things were.

You might think that getting paid for a project, even if it came to nothing, means that it couldn’t have been pointless, but I am old-fashioned, and I like to think that my work has some direct value.

Riding the Russian bear

I’ve been living in Central and Eastern Europe for nearly three decades, so I’ve seen the region take three steps forwards, and then a step or two back, both politically and economically. Never more so than in Russia. I particularly remember the heady 1990s, when the Russian economy burst into chaos after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Freedom reigned in Moscow, too much of it for some. It was exuberant, expressive, socially liberating, unpopular, and on the whole disastrous.

We were well into the more sober Putin era when my company (LLP Group, based in Prague) was persuaded to dip its toe into the Russian market. We took over the customers of a firm for whom things had gone disastrously wrong. It was difficult at first because almost everything gets in the way in Russia (the form-over-substance financial regulations, the appalling cost of business services, the aggressive nature of customer-supplier relations, the prejudice against ‘Western’ software), but we made progress, and even some small profits in due course.

But these last few months have been more difficult. When the rouble fell in value some weeks ago we found that our bank simply couldn’t or wouldn’t convert our rouble balance into a safer currency and we saw our bank balances shrink in EUR value.

We resell software and consulting mainly to international companies investing in the Russian market. The accounting software we sell, Infor’s SunSystems, can meet both Russian and corporate requirements simultaneously. But, now, with many companies downsizing, or even leaving, it’s hard for us to know what to do. There are fewer companies who need what we sell.

Russian bear

Where is Russia going? Has the country set out on a path towards isolation, or has it been unjustly expelled?

Whatever the situation, we have no plans to leave. We have an excellent team of consultants in Moscow and St Petersburg, and we can break even at the moment, serving our current clients. It’s hard to know, though, if there will ever be new business for us in the future.

Granted, Western ideology informs much of Western reporting on Russian issues (Ukraine first and foremost), but I can’t help thinking that, for the moment, Russian pride has trumped pragmatism. Surely, things will only get worse for ordinary Russian citizens if Putin doesn’t seek a change of direction.

We don’t want to abandon our business. If only Russia were a little more like us, we wouldn’t have to.