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Cleveland, Wis. Wisconsin's most unusual Soviet joint venture is housed in a cramped cinder- block building, originally built to house migrant farm workers, tucked between a trailer park and a farmer's field in rural Manitowoc County.
Inside the narrow building, just eight paces wide and with ceilings low enough to brush with one's hand, Innovation Computer Corp. has made a computer now orbiting the Earth in the Soviet space station Mir, and others in place in the Kremlin that enable the Supreme Soviet to communicate with the US Congress.
On this particular day, three Soviet computer scientists are touring the operation. They have come to Wisconsin for a meeting of the board of directors of a joint venture between Innovation Computer and Moscow's Institute for Automated Systems, a government research organization.
Oleg Smirnov, director of the research institute, was a pioneer in developing Soviet telecommunications software. He proudly recalls creating the first computer link between the USSR and the West, when he connected his Moscow computers to a terminal in Vienna.
Today, Smirnov is equally proud of being a pioneer Soviet entrepreneur. He's chairman of I- Cubed-C, the US-Soviet joint venture that sells computer software packages "solutions," as Smirnov calls them.