I’ve written about this before a couple of times, to much disbelief. They had the same #, pre- Rostelcom, when they were apparently much much closer to going under. And yes, I got the impression that almost all were super part-time though maybe some were still working in their free time.
And yet, even then, we got a fair amount of development.
It’s a shame they never had a documentary team covering them. It’s quite a story now and would be great publicity.