Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research
(Military Unit 40056)

The Defense Ministry Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research 10th Department (or the submarine intelligence service) was established in 1976, responsible for Russian ‘underwater engineering’. Hydronauts ["Deep-sea spetsnaz"] is a term that is relatively new, even to long-time students of Russian military affairs. A check of sources within the Russian military indicates that the topic is rarely discussed in the open press, if at all. The force, which uses submarines, is an Army and not a Navy unit. The force’s focus is to bug communications cables, install movement sensors, and collect the wreckage of ships, aircraft, and satellites from the seabed. These divers work at depths of 3000-6000 meters in miniature submarines.

These submarines were officially referred to as "nuclear deep-water station" and abbreviated AU. Sailors call them "kids" - assigned to the Ministry of Defense and worked on the instructions of the Main Intelligence Directorate. Only the 1986 were the submarines added to the lists of the navy. However, the management of their activities was still carried out directly from Moscow.

Project 1910 nuclear powered deepwater stations were designed to perform specific tasks in the depths of the oceans, and were intended to replace the previous generation of deep-towed vehicles "Seliger".

In 1979, for basic maintenance and operation of the ACS carriers at the Northern Fleet at Gadzhiyevo [Bay of deer] initiated the formation of the 29th separate brigade of submarines.

According to the site editor MilitaryRussia Dmitry Kornev, in 1980-2000 years of the machine with the main management of deep-sea research carried out special missions in the Japan Sea, the North Atlantic and the Arctic. The 45707 military unit was stationed in the city of Peterhof Leningrad region. Structurally related to the General Directorate of the Russian Defense Ministry deep-sea research.

Izvestiya was told by former naval officer and hydronaut Vladimir Ashik that his colleagues’ job was to collect intelligence information about enemy equipment, protect and service Soviet deep-water communications lines, and bring up from the bottom the wreckage of secret equipment left behind after tests or accidents.

In the early 2000s the Defense Ministry’s special center in Moscow was reorganized to form the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, whose work was classified.

In October 1976, by order of the Navy Commander was formed military unit 45707 - detachment of sailors to operate nuclear deep-water station (AGS), modeled on the cosmonaut corps. Candidates for the detachment had to meet a number of requirements: to serve in submarines of the Navy of the USSR Supreme at least 5 years, to be a member of the CPSU and undergo a medical examination on the same requirements as the astronauts. Since under the terms of the design, construction and operation of deep nuclear power stations significantly different from submarines, operating them, received the status of hydronauts.

Forming the unit was commissioned submarine officer Captain 1st Rank Plato Chebotaev Alexandrovich (1930-2004), who formed a detachment on the territory of the 39th brigade of submarines (outside Rimsky-Korsakov in Leningrad). He was appointed deputy commander of the detachment - Captain 1st Rank Eduard Ivanovich Lakmanova (1929-199?). Later, the detachment was transferred to a small town on Skipper duct, which previously conducted studies on the effects of nuclear radiation on living organisms. There's detachment was based until 1992.

In 1978 squads were recruited to teach the 1st and 2nd crews AC-13 (Project 1910). Hydronauts involved in the tests and operates the deepwater subsea hardware, train specialists in maintenance of this equipment. Also conducted research work on the study of the functioning of the human body in a variety of conditions deep sea diving. All information on the activities of hydronauts is secret. According to unofficial data, hydronauts engaged in intelligence activities - listen to communications cables, install motion sensors, as well as collected from the seabed shipwrecks, planes and satellites. According to a former officer in the Navy, Vladimir hydronauts Ashiq, "the task of his colleagues was to collect intelligence on the enemy equipment, security and maintenance of Soviet deep sea lines of communication, the rise from the bottom of the secret techniques residues remaining after the test or accidents."

According to figures from the Comptroller’s Office auditors, the hydronauts were the most highly paid employees in the military -- they were receiving 500,000-600,000 [rubles] a month. For comparison, the commander of a motorized rifle brigade in Siberia and the Far East receives no more than 80,000 rubles a month, while the commander of a strategic bomber base with the rank of colonel receives no more than 180,000.

The auditors note that in 2009 the then Defense Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov unlawfully set the booster coefficient -- by which the salary is increased -- at 2.9 for hydronauts. In this context, the hydronauts’ salaries rose from 6,300-9,300 rubles to 34,500-45,000 rubles a month. Then a 100% supplement was added to that.

Izvestiya was told by former naval officer and hydronaut Vladimir Ashik that “After the setting of salaries and supplements taking into account the above-mentioned coefficient on the salary, the pay for hydronauts in 2012 (after deduction of individual income tax) amounted to between 500,000 and 590,000 rubles a month,” the auditors reported.

“The financiers calculated the bonus from a transcript of the device’s onboard log. This indicated minute by minute how long we worked, and at what depth. The supplements were applied for every hour at a depth in excess of 500 meters, but above that depth it was the usual rate for submariners,” Ashik told Izvestiya.

According to him, on being discharged from the army the hydronauts were assigned the usual pensions, like submariners, because their personal files made no mention of their belonging to a detachment working at extreme depths.

“Our personal files contain no trace of our ever having been hydronauts. When we asked the military commissariats to clarify where we performed our service and how our pensions should be calculated, we received the reply that the officers of military commissariats do not have access to documents in this field and therefore are unable to clarify anything,” Ashik told Izvestiya.

Dmitriy Kornev, editor of the MilitaryRussia website, explained to Izvestiya that in 1980-2000 devices belonging to the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research performed special missions in the Sea of Japan in the North Atlantic and in the Arctic. “Nobody in the world has the same experience of working on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean as the hydronauts from the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research -- this is our own unique national experience. During many years of operation there by nuclear deep-sea stations there was not a single accident, although, in the depths, the crews of these devices have no contact with the land. This is the direct consequence of the extremely high level of training of hydronaut officers. Therefore of course the hydronauts deserve such big wages,” Kornev explained.

GUGI / Gug / Googie - Disambiguation

The acronym for the Main Directorate of Deep Research [GUGI] of the Russian Federation Ministry of Defense frequently is machine translated as "Googie".

Googie architecture emerged in the post-WWII car-culture and thrived in the 1950s and 1960s. Bold angles, colorful signs, plate glass, sweeping cantilevered roofs and pop-culture imagery captured the attention of drivers on adjacent streets. Bowling alleys looked like Tomorrowland. Coffee shops looked like something in a Jetsons cartoon.

For decades, many "serious" architects decried Googie as frivolous or crass. But today it is recognized how perfectly its form followed its function. Even as the best historic examples are bulldozed, architects are rediscovering the importance and utility of Googie and are adopting it for their own designs.

H.P.Lovercraft [Howard Phillips Lovecraft] (20 August 1890 – 15 March 1937) was an American author of fantasy and horror fiction, noted for giving horror stories a science fiction framework. During his lifetime Lovecraft's readership rather was limited, but towards the end of the 20th Century his works became influential among writers and fans of horror fiction.

In 1917, prompted by W. Paul Cook and other amateur journalists who had been impressed by two youthful excursions into the weird, "The Beast in the Cave" (l905) and "The Alchemist" (1908), H. P. Lovecraft wrote "The Tomb" and "Dagon," the tales that mark the start of his career as an author of horror fiction. He began as a monarchistwho lamented the American Revolution and the split with England, and ended as aconfirmed socialist. Lovecraft’s political philosophy would be incomplete if his racism were neglected. His works include thinly veiled projections of his racialist fears of an alien overthrow of Nordicculture through excessive immigration and miscegenation.

Sadly, Lovecraft's prejudices mar his initial efforts. His first tale with a distinct New England setting, "The Terrible Old Man" (1920), amounts to little more than a polemic against the intrusion of people he regarded as "foreigners," that is, the non-English immigrants who came in the nineteenth century as cheap labor. After returning from New York to Rhode Island, he produced almost all of his best known short stories, including The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath.

"Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath" was published in 1943 in the author's "Beyond the walls of sleep", and as a serial in 1848 in the Arkham sampler. It is a spectacularly unusual fantasy tale. Randolph Carter embarks on an epic quest across a world beyond the wall of sleep in search of an opulent and mysterious sunset city - Unknown Kadath, the mountainous home of the gods. When he prays to the gods of dream to reveal the whereabouts of this magical city, they do not answer, and his dreams stop altogether. Undaunted, Carter resolves to go to Kadath, where the gods live, and beseech them in person. However, no one has ever been to Kadath, and no one even knows how to get there ? but that won’t stop Randolph Carter from trying. Carter goes to the moon, talks to cats, sails on the seas, and encounters weird creatures both helpful and harmful. H.P.Lovecraft's work is notoriously difficult to render in visual terms.

Along the way his journey is impeded by a series of confrontations with grotesque creatures. They representeons of intermingling between unearthly and even inferior men. The creatures are directly representational of the hordes of immigrants in New York during the 1920s.

Gugs are a species of creatures featured in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. “It was a paw, fully two feet and a half across, and equipped with formidable talons. After it came another paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to which both of the paws were attached by short forearms. Then two pink eyes shone, and the head of the awakened gug sentry, large as a barrel, wabbled into view. The eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by bony protuberances overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had great yellow fangs and ran from the top to the bottom of the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally.”