MOSCOW — Russia is everyone's Y2K nightmare--a deteriorating nation with dozens of outdated nuclear power plants and a dangerous arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Although Russia woke late to the danger, though, the fact that it has far fewer computerized systems than most Western countries gives this otherwise backward country a significant advantage in preparing for the triple-zero day.
"In the 1970s, the United States took a giant leap into computers," said Vyacheslav I. Martinov, vice general director of NPO Mashinostroeniye, a Russian defense contractor working on the problem. "We were late in joining the Information Age. We have no big computer base."
Most of Russia's financial and commercial computer systems were installed after the Soviet collapse and are more modern than similar systems in the West. The country has a relatively minor presence on the Internet, and most of its older computers are in small, isolated systems. Moreover, though few ordinary Russians have ever heard of the millennium bug, most specialists have been aware of it for years.
Martinov said he first encountered it in the 1980s when a Russian agency hired an elderly man as a consultant. He was born in 1898, and the computer system balked. "So we added two more digits to the date and that was that," Martinov said.
Since then, Martinov's company has developed sophisticated computer programs to seek and destroy two-digit dates hidden in old lines of computer code. It has tried to market the technology to Russians, but all 10 of its clients have turned out to be foreigners, largely Americans. "America is rich, so it's rich in computers," Martinov said. "There is no market here for fixing the Y2K problem."
But that doesn't mean there's no problem. And for the most part, it's in the government's machinery.
Alexander Krupnov, chairman of the Central Telecommunications Commission, is coordinating the government's Y2K preparations. An initial assessment last summer indicated it would need about $500 million to fix and upgrade its systems. After a more thorough assessment, he upped that estimate this year to $2 billion to $3 billion--nearly 15% of the federal budget.
Since the government simply doesn't have that kind of money, Krupnov has urged government agencies to take responsibility for their own computers and seek outside sources of funding, including Western aid.
