Hi Dave, Sorry to say that I have not managed to enlarge the photo on the bikecult site to such an extent that one might have a look at the headbagde / nameplate or any other significant thing.
Now the two last words cynep cnopt mean "super sport", which doesn´t need any futher translation, And I would have loved to have a closer look at the first word, as it neither seems to be an outright Russian word, nor one of those typical Soviet abbreviations they used for all sorts of things, from toy to rocket works. Would it be possible to mail me some close-ups of all the remaining writing / lettering on the bike?
In the illustrated books on cycle racing I bought when I lived in the SU in the eighties ("Gonochnye velosipedy", meaning "Racing Bicycles", by Lioubovicki, 1989, and "Gonka s tenyou" , meaning "Racing a Shadow", by Kouchmi, you can see all sorts of bikes, de Rosas, Colnagos, Peugeots, kitted out with all the goodies. My idea is that, foreign currency having been at a premium, lateron they tried to build their own high end frames.
They certainly did in the amateur sector (Well, we know they all were amateurs, of course!) in Khar´kov, Ukraine at KhVZ. Their V-552I or 555 seem nice bikes. KhVZ literature gives randonneurs, road and track racers, even a tandem which I do not think has ever been built, but a MAXUOH does not surface anywhere. My info, of course, is from 1991 at the latest. Especially Lioubovicki is very scientific and gives lots of nice drawings (funny, that, having drawings instead of photos of all those modern bikes), and a Soviet high end workshop would certainly have been shown.
But, on a finishing note, a horrible suspicion: Kyrillic letters also are used by all sorts of peoples, Bulgarians, Serbs, Middle Asians who were given it by the Soviets during the twenties, and so on. Are you sure that your bike is Soviet?
Yours, Toni, Osnabrueck, Germany.