Hello Nick
I am from Russia. After a little bit of googling…
АРГОН-Б is a electro-mechanical teletype for printing and analyzing RTTY messages (ITA-2) from АРГОН-Ч.
АРГОН-Ч is a demodulator.
This devices are part of the military RTTY system - Р-381Д
There is very limited info on Russian military stuff on the web.
Storage Device (Number of Characters per Minute?) - yes it is
There are two columns because it can read messages with standard stop bit length interval and with extended stop bit length interval.
Vladimir