From the author:

I left the institution with the apocalyptic name of SevNIIGiM for the stokers. Science there huddled against the wall like a beggar. I was a member of a computer center, wrote programs in an extinct computer language, and typed them onto punch cards myself. A month after my metamorphosis, the programmer Galya called me from there, and soon appeared with her husband. As far as I remember, he worked as a janitor, but he wanted to be a stoker. He was also one of the educated and the protestors, one of those who could no longer stand with them. His name was Sasha Kobak. I brought him to Tamara Vasilievna; he became the second shift foreman. The third, through Kobak, was Slava Dolinin, who was hired for the same position. Both belonged to the second culture: a semi-underground environment in which each, to one degree or another, opposed the vulgar and incompetent regime. From Kobak the thread stretched to the writers, from Dolinin - to the struggle and conspiracy, to the People's Labor Union, the political party of which he was a member. In the following months, outcasts of all stripes poured into the 1st October precinct: poets, painters, crosses, scoundrels , devotees. The second culture gave less than it seemed at the beginning of freedoms in the 1990s - and than it seems to its veterans today. Brodsky turned out to be one of the best poets of Brodsky's era. Nothing remained of the other noisy names at that time. But at the same time, the social significance of this environment was great, and for its participants - enormous. This was a way out of the Soviet deadlock, from the mutual responsibility of lies, madness and meanness.