Flights of Fancy From a Harsh Life

Now, sailing out to sea in this chunky, ungainly vessel is his only escape from the disappointment and poverty of the new Russia.

All over the nation, even in the most remote and primitive villages, people like Puchkov tinker with outlandish inventions in their solitary workshops, driven by dreams of a better life and a better world.

At first Puchkov planned a paraglider with flapping wings, but he fell back on the idea of a submarine. Viktor Frolov dreamed of making a submarine and ended up building homemade planes. Nikolai Kirzhayev scares the local cows and annoys the neighbors with his unreliable flying machines.

Ask 40-year-old Puchkov why he decided to design and build a personal submarine in the suffocating era of Leonid I. Brezhnev's rule, and he pauses at length before chuckling quietly, recalling the optimistic 20-year-old he was then.

"I was not satisfied with the fate that was laid out for me," he said. "I wanted to satisfy myself and to have some respect for myself. If I learned to respect myself, I felt it would be easier to find my niche in life."

Twenty years later, Puchkov has a soul-destroying factory job instead of a fulfilling niche. But he has dignity and self-respect because he realized his improbable--and illegal--dream.

Russians call this quaint breed of quixotic inventors kulibins, after Ivan Kulibin, an 18th century mechanical engineer who designed dozens of devices, both practical and whimsical, few of which were manufactured. He died at 83 in deep poverty.

The Soviet space, weapons and aviation programs were all testament to Russians' inventive genius, but there were as many creative misfits as there were conformists. These kulibins channeled their talents in eccentric ways.

Nearly everyone in St. Petersburg has heard of Puchkov and his submarine, but almost nobody can say where he is. Search long enough, however, and he can be found in a wooden shed amid a clutter of maritime junk on the Neva River.

Puchkov opens the hatch of his submarine, releasing a heady waft of gasoline fumes. Five years ago he increased the length of the craft from 10 to 16 feet and added an engine for surface operation, an electric motor for diving and two fuel tanks. In case of an emergency, he still has the pedals and carries a paddle.

He sits inside on a hard steel bench amid the dials, valves, rubber tubes and steel pipes. He can sail 100 miles a day and submerge to 30 feet.

In 1981, when he started building the submarine, he feared that friends and neighbors would misunderstand his passion and knew that the authorities would have crushed his dream and confiscated the sub. So he built the craft secretly in an attic in Ryazan, about 120 miles southeast of Moscow.

"I started building it even before perestroika," he explained, referring to the political reforms of the mid-1980s. "If people had known I had a submarine, I wouldn't have been allowed to go out into the sea."

With no experience and no instruction manuals, he designed and improved the sub by trial and error, testing it at night in a river and concealing it during the day 10 feet below the surface.

"I didn't know it would work," he said. "I just hoped."

The longer the project dragged on, the more caustically his father condemned it. During the first test in 1984, it sank like a stone, breaking a rudder. The early dives were always tense.

"I was so distracted watching for leaks, checking all the equipment, that I didn't have time to enjoy it," he recalled. "You don't remember a thing afterward."

It took three years before he got the submarine to dive and surface. In 1988, he put the reinforced plastic sub in a box on a truck and shipped it to the Tosna River about 15 miles south of St. Petersburg. There, he continued his nocturnal voyages. In 1994, he took to the open sea on a secret cruise to the island of Kronshtadt, a closed military base in the Gulf of Finland.