TWENTY years ago in St Petersburg, which in those days was still called Leningrad – a name too pallid for its spires and gilded domes – a theatre director called Tatyana Jacovskaya walked into the small apartment of Eduard Bersudsky, whose job was operating a gas boiler, and saw a sight which caught her breath and made her heart leap like a crow in a cage. "I was scared," she recalls now over tea in Glasgow. "I realised I would have to drop what I was doing with my life and do something with this. It was just too good."

What Tatyana saw were 12 machines, known as kinemats, which Eduard had carved from tree trunks and furniture retrieved from skips. They were mechanical sculptures, some very large, beautiful and eerie. They featured jesters, monkeys, Stalin brandishing an axe. One, The Castle (1937), was like a cross between a church steeple and the torture machine in Kafka's In The Penal Colony; it was a memorial to the victims of Soviet repression.

These filled Eduard's home. He lived among them, sleeping at night on a couch. He had no thought of becoming a famous artist. He was simply rendering his dreams and nightmares in wood and wire. "At one time, it would have been unthinkable to show this to Russians," says Tatyana, 61. "It was ideologically incorrect. But with perestroika, it became possible." Thus, Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre was born.

Eduard and Tatyana, and her son Sergey, have lived and worked in Scotland since 1994. They lived first in the Borders, but moved to Glasgow in 1996. They exhibit in a red sandstone building at 64 Osborne Street, though next year are moving to Trongate 103, part of a cluster of art organisations in an Edwardian warehouse.

They enjoy Glasgow – "Glaswegians are strange, so they appreciate others being strange" – and though junkies have broken into their space on more than one occasion, they tend to be scared off by the looming mechanical rook, wearing a top hat, which rings a bell when the door is opened.

Glasgow audiences react to Sharmanka in different ways. Adults are generally amazed but sometimes very moved. Retired Clydeside shipbuilders bring their grandkids and explain that this is the sort of magic you can create if you know how to use your hands. Tatyana says one family brought an autistic boy to see the show for the first time when he was 12, and each time he returned he opened up a little more, beginning to communicate with people.

Eduard, Tatyana and Sergey made the move from Russia because the authorities demanded extortionate rents on the workshop and theatre space as a way of expressing their disapproval of the art. "Part of the story also is that we are Jewish," says Tatyana. They felt anti-semitism pervading Russian society in tandem with the rise of nationalism. Sergey's walk to school took him past protesters holding banners saying, 'Russia for the Russians'. On leaving the synagogue, he knew he had to take off his kippah or risk being beaten up.

"That was the beginning of a huge problem in Russian society," says Tatyana. "They hate any others. They are brainwashed into thinking people want to destroy Russia. They think America, Georgia, Israel are their enemies. Foreign students are being killed in St Petersburg and Moscow for being black." She shows me a recent satirical sculpture called Brainwashing Machine in which a wooden lion, who looks rather like Vladimir Putin, distracts a happy monkey in a cage with ringing bells.

While Tatyana is talking, Eduard is busy in the background, reassembling work which has just been returned from an exhibition in Germany. Sharmanka has been closed for a while but everything will be up and running again by September 25. He's wrapping chains around a battleship which appears to have been made from an old iron bath and a stovepipe. "Aurora," he tells me. He points to a carving of a mouse wearing spectacles sitting on the prow. "That's Lenin."

Eduard only knows a few English words – "coffee, tea, vodka?" he asks when I arrive – but even in Russian he barely speaks at all. He says all he wants to say in the work.

He is 70 years old with longish white hair, a white beard and a twinkle in his eye. The photographer asks him to smile. He shakes his head. "No smile. Never. Very serious man." Then he says: "I am an animal," and begins loping like a monkey.

Art is his life. He used to graft 12 hours a day, seven days a week, but now he only does 10 hours a day, six days a week. He never plans his pieces on paper. They are improvised. Sometimes an idea will come to him when he holds a piece of junk.

He recently got his hands on a cast-iron apple-corer, once used in a Victorian mince pie factory. It didn't take him long to realise that it would make an excellent horse. That piece, the Apple Eaters, is one of seven new works, all based on 19th-century appliances, which Tatyana hopes will tour Scotland. She grabs a skull-faced clown by a brass penis fashioned from an hour glass. "This is about how short our life is."

When Eduard first moved to Scotland, he made friends with a chimney sweep called Jock Redburn, who loved beautiful old things and had amassed a private scrap-yard full of remnants from British industrial design. He sold them to Eduard cheap. These days, though, as that sort of material has become more fashionable, it is harder to find. The Barras used to be good for it, but not now. So Eduard tells Tatyana what he needs and she tracks it down on eBay. It's amazing how many old Singer sewing machines you can pick up online.

There isn't much money in all of this. Any income Sharmanka gets from exhibiting and commissions goes into building more machines, each of which can cost around £3,000 to make. It's a family business in which Eduard, Tatyana and Sergey work non-stop. "We do this out of love," she says. "Otherwise, I would not survive this life."