Beating Soviet swords into plowshares

Marshall

SOUTH BEND -- After spending the first half of the 1990s helping the former states of the Soviet Union find ways to eliminate one type of weapon of mass destruction, resident Bruce Marshall is now turning his attention to another.

Marshall, the head of Prizm Consulting Inc. of South Bend, recently signed contracts for his firm to help officials in Russia and Uzbekistan convert facilities once involved in developing biological weapons into peaceful and, hopefully, profitable uses.

Taking on the formidable task is a natural progression for Marshall.

In the mid-1990s, while a vice president with Thiolkol Inc. of Ogden, Utah, he oversaw the company's successful conversion of liquid fuel used by Russian intercontinental nuclear rockets into commercial chemicals.

The work also involved dismantling some missile silos and converting some Soviet SS-18 ICBMs for use in launching commercial satellites.

"Rather than just bulldozing everything, we wanted to convert as much as we could to peaceful uses," said Marshall, who maintains a home office here. "We helped change U.S. policy."

The work was carried out under a contract with the U.S. Defense Department's Cooperative Threat Reduction Agency.

Under its newest contract with the agency, Prizm will be analyzing five former biological weapons facilities around Tashkent in Uzbekistan and four in Russia. It will then put together five-year strategic plans for commercial use of portions of the plants' technologies.

Instrumental in gaining the contracts for Prizm, Marshall said, was Mikhail P. Kazachkov, a former Soviet "refusenik" who was imprisoned for 15 years in the Gulag.

Kazachkov now heads Moscow-based TechnoConsult Inc., formed in 1993 to assist western companies hoping to do business in the former Soviet Union. Prizm purchased a controlling interest in the 35-person consulting firm in 2001.

Prizm and TechnoConsult have a huge task ahead of them, said Kazachkov.

"The Soviet biological weapons program was enormously vast. Nobody in the American intelligence community believed it was as extensive as it was," he said. "They refused to believe the first defectors who told them about its scope, but what they said proved to be absolutely correct."

It was what former Soviet officials thought were Kazachkov's own defection plans that led to his lengthy imprisonment. He had been working in Leningrad as a theoretical atomic physicist. He now lives in Somerville, Mass.

In 1975, one week after he applied to emigrate, he was arrested. He was confined in several prisons and labor camps before being discovered in 1990 at a Gulag camp near Perm just west of the Ural Mountains.

He finally was released in November of that year. He was the last prisoner freed from the notorious Gulag prison camps.

The lengthy stay behind bars was his second career -- "as a guest of the KGB hotel chain," Kazachkov jokes today.

One difficulty those involved in converting former Soviet weapons facilities already have run into is that, unlike most aspects of life under communist rule, there was no central government agency coordinating biotechnology, he said.

Bruce Marshall of South Bend, left, in trench coat, meets with Russian officials in Moscow last year. Marshall is working with officials in Russia and Uzbekistan to convert biological weapons facilities into more peaceful uses. Photo provided

"They have to go to each facility and talk directly to the people now running them," Kazachkov said. "There is no agency in biotechnology that controls everything. It was all kept separate to ensure maximum security. We are now trying to clean up the debris of that system."

Steps also have to be taken to ensure that converting facilities into peaceful uses won't be reversed later.

"When it comes to bioweapons and facilities, conversion is not easy. The potential for reverse conversion is exceedingly high," Kazachkov said. "Those huge fermenters may be producing vaccine today, but that can be turned around in a week for more deadly uses, and no satellite photo will show it."

Still, Kazachkov said he is optimistic new uses can be found for many of the facilities, with some American financial and technological help.

"The Pentagon is beginning to understand that technology push is not as good as market pull. You need to go to the market and ask what it needs. It has to come from the market," he said.

As the former Soviet states seek to evolve out of more than 70 years of communist rule, there is a growing middle class that American firms can tap into.

"Russia is effectively a country of middle class values without middle class income -- yet," he said. "President (Vladimir) Putin is playing kind of a two-stage process. The first was cleaning the stables. The second has to involve dramatically increasing western investment into the economy. The Kremlin has no other choice.

"The more insightful American companies are beginning to see that and position themselves for involvement in the Russian marketplace," Kazachkov said.

One of Prizm's goals is to help American firms tap into those new markets, Marshall said.

"There are a lot of medium-sized companies that can do a lot of things in Russia," he said. "There's a big middle market area they can get into."

The manufactured housing industry, a big force in Michiana, could find plenty to do there, Marshall said.

"One of the things we really haven't tried yet there is housing. There is tremendous potential," he said. "What the Russians do very well is solve problems. What they don't do well is manufacture."

Kazachkov said TechnoConsult, which got its start doing analysis of Russian telecommunications needs, helps American firms bridge the cultural gap of doing business in the former Soviet Union.

"You have to be able to synthesize, to take part of the western and part of the Russian and combine them properly," he said. "In time, Russia will need its own management style to succeed. We're beginning to work on that."

Marshall said it didn't take him long to see the value of partnering with a Russian firm.

"Doing business in Russia is different than doing business anywhere else on earth," he said.

Kazachkov, whose firm runs a technology park in Chin, said he can foresee future three-way partnerships between American, Soviet and Chinese firms.

"I believe someday very soon we will be able to create a very lucrative triangle -- Russian brains, Chinese hands and American marketing capabilities," he said. "It sounds like a winner."

Staff writer Don Porter:

(574) 235-6350