Termen Lev Sergeevich. Lev Theremin - inventor of electronic music, Soviet intelligence officer, political prisoner and Stalin Prize laureate

What in America, what in Russia Termen only dreamed
about one thing: not to interfere with his work.

Lev Theremin are considered one of the Soviet avant-garde artists and pioneers of electronics, they say that he either worked as a spy or died in exile, and his instrument is called such a strange invention that allegedly even he Theremin I couldn't play on it. These are just rumors - but the reality is no less interesting. The creator of the theremin turned out to be a witness to all eras of the 20th century, was familiar with celebrities from various countries, and at the same time he lived as if he did not notice the political storms of his century.
Lev Theremin born on August 15 (28), 1896 in St. Petersburg into a noble Orthodox family with French Huguenot roots (in French family name written as Theremin).Father - famous lawyer Sergei Emilievich Termen, mother - Evgenia Antonovna. Leo was the first-born in the family. His parents contributed to the development of Lev’s abilities: he took cello lessons, a physics laboratory was equipped in the apartment, and then a home observatory. Lev was sent to study at the St. Petersburg First Men's Gymnasium. Already in the third grade, Lev became interested in physics, and in the fourth grade he demonstrated “Tesla-type resonance.” Lev graduated from high school with a silver medal in 1914.
In 1920 Lev Theremin starts working for the professor A. F. Ioffe at the newly created Physico-Technical Institute in Petrograd. Once a young scientist noticed that the movement of his hands near the capacitor plates (the gap between them was filled with gas) produced strange, wonderful sounds.

Theremin I tried to put together a melody - classes at the conservatory helped - and the device began to sing. Theremin I fitted my headphones and enjoyed the music emerging from the air and the movement of my hands. At the institute they joked: “Theremin plays the voltmeter.” This is how the world's first non-contact musical instrument was created.

Ioffe seems to give him fantastic theme For thesis: “electrical foresight.” But Ioffe believes that his brilliant graduate student will cope with any task. AND Theremin did not disappoint the teacher: he created and demonstrated working prototypes of a device for “wireless” image transmission over a distance. To put it simply, in 1926 Theremin invented television!
Several years before the first experiments Zvorykina in America he built a real electronic TV.

The TV had a screen no less than 150x150 centimeters (this was at a time when they experimented with matchbox screens), and a resolution of 100 lines. And it worked! In 1927, representatives of the military elite of the Soviets - Voroshilov, Tukhachevsky, Budyonny- watched with delight Stalin walking through the Kremlin courtyard. You could even make out a mustache and a pipe. This demonstration, as it turned out, was fatal for the invention: it was classified in the hope of using it to protect borders. Needless to say, it was never implemented, and the primacy Theremin in this case it has been proven only in our time.
In 1927 Lev Sergeevich sent to Frankfurt am Main, to International exhibition- glorify with theremin Soviet science and culture. After the exhibition Theremin triumphantly traveled all over Germany, performing at the famous London Albert Hall and at the Paris Grand Opera. The press of all countries was filled with rave reviews. Albert Einstein wrote: “Sound freely extracted from space is a completely new phenomenon.”

Theremin's cello. The inventor plays

Theremin lived in New York for a decade. He buys a Cadillac and is accepted into the elite US Millionaires Club, although he never became a millionaire. The company he created to produce contactless security alarm systems is thriving. General Electric and RCA have acquired a license to manufacture theremin and they produced about a thousand of them. In 1930 Theremin invents the electronic cello and his first drum kit - "rhythmicon". He rents a six-story house for 99 years, where he opens a music studio, instrumental workshops and laboratories, and teaches musicians to play his miracle instrument.

Rhythmikon - the first rhythm machine, that is, a device for creating periodic drum fragments

Lev Theremin organized the companies Teletouch and Theremin Studio and rented a six-story building for a music and dance studio in New York for 99 years. This made it possible to create trade missions of the USSR in the United States, under whose “roof” Soviet intelligence officers could work.

In 1931-1938 Theremin was a director of Teletouch Inc. At the same time, he developed alarm systems for the Sing Sing and Alcatraz prisons.

Soon Lev Theremin became a very popular person in New York. Been to his studio George Gershwin, Maurice Ravel, Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein. His circle of acquaintances included financial tycoon John Rockefeller, future president USA Dwight Eisenhower

In 1938 Theremin recalled to Moscow. He secretly left the USA, registering in the name of the owner of the Teletouch company Bob Zinman power of attorney to dispose of his property and manage patent and financial affairs. Theremin I wanted to take my wife with me to the USSR Lavinia, but he was told that she would arrive later. When they came for him, Lavinia She happened to be at home, and she got the impression that her husband was taken away by force.
In Leningrad Theremin unsuccessfully tried to get a job, then moved to Moscow, but did not find a job there either.
In March 1939 he was arrested. There are two versions of what charge was brought against him. According to one of them, he was accused of involvement in fascist organization, according to another - in preparation for murder Kirov. He was forced to incriminate himself that a group of astronomers from the Pulkovo Observatory was preparing to place a landmine in a Foucault pendulum, and Theremin was supposed to send a radio signal from the USA and detonate a landmine as soon as it approached the pendulum Kirov. A special meeting of the NKVD of the USSR sentenced Theremin to eight years in the camps, and he was sent to a camp for Kolyma.
First time Theremin served time in Magadan, working as a foreman of a construction team. But he was recalled to the Central Design Bureau, where he was destined to work with Sergei Korolev, who on April 21, 1939 ended up in Kolyma, where from August 3 he was at the Maldyak gold mine of the Western Mining Directorate and was employed in the so-called general works.
Aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, who was imprisoned in those years and worked for the benefit of the country in the closed NKVD design bureau - TsKB-29 ("Tupolev's sharaga"), saw Lev Sergeevich cutting out a model of an airplane from plywood, and gave him an assistant - the same Korolev. It was a very interesting meeting between two outstanding personalities.
Numerous innovation proposals Theremin attracted the attention of the camp administration to him, and already in 1940 he was transferred to the Tupolev design bureau TsKB-29 (to the so-called “Tupolev sharaga”), where he worked for about eight years. Here his assistant was Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, later a famous designer of space technology. One of the activities Theremin And Queen was the development of radio-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles - prototypes of modern cruise missiles.

One of the developments Theremin- listening system "Buran", which uses a reflected infrared beam to read the vibrations of glass in the windows of the listening room. This is the invention Theremin It was observed Stalin Prize first degree in 1947. But due to the fact that the laureate was a prisoner at the time of presentation for the prize and the secretive nature of his work, the award was not publicly announced anywhere.

Soviet endovibrator inside a copy of the Great Seal of the United States, National Museum cryptography at the Agency national security USA

Another development - endovibrator "Zlatoust", a listening device without batteries and electronics based on high-frequency resonance, which worked in the office of American ambassadors undetected for eight years. The listening device was mounted in a wooden panel made of valuable wood, depicting the Great Seal of the United States.

The panel was presented in 1945 to the US ambassador invited to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Artek pioneer camp. Averell Harriman, who hung it in his office. The design of the listening device turned out to be so successful that when examining the gift, the American intelligence services did not notice anything. The “bug” was discovered in 1952, and was later presented to the UN as evidence of the intelligence activities of the USSR, but the principle of its operation remained unsolved for several years.
To “press on a tear,” the pioneers sang the American anthem at the gala concert. The touched ambassador, looking at the gift handed to him, only managed to mutter: “Where should I keep it?” Immediately behind him, Valentin Mikhailovich Berezhkov, Stalin’s personal translator, stood up and casually said: “Hang it in your office.” The British will burst with envy.” He said and nodded towards the British Ambassador to the USSR, Sir Archibald Kerr, who was also present at the ceremony, but did not receive SUCH a gift.

Before hanging the wooden eagle at the embassy, American technicians, of course, “probed” it for bugs. But they were not found, because Lev Theremin’s device was passive and did not emit anything in itself. And then the souvenir was actually hung in the ambassador’s office. Operation Confession, the goal of which was to smuggle a bug into the US Embassy building, ended in success.
In 1947 Theremin was rehabilitated, but continued to work in closed design bureaus in the NKVD system of the USSR, where he was engaged, in particular, in the development of eavesdropping systems.

In 1948, he and his wife Maria Gushchina two daughters are born - Natalia Termen And Elena Termen.

In 1991, together with his daughter, Natalia Termen, and granddaughter, Olga Termen, he visited the USA at the invitation of Stanford University and there, among other things, met with Clara Rockmore.

In March 1991, at the age of 95, he joined the CPSU. When asked why he was joining a collapsing party, Theremin answered: “I promised Lenin.”
In 1992, unknown persons destroyed a laboratory room on Lomonosovsky Prospekt (the room was allocated by the Moscow authorities at the request of V. S. Grizodubova), all his instruments were broken, part of the archives were stolen. The police did not solve the crime.
In 1992, the Theremin Center was created in Moscow, with its main goal being to support musicians and sound artists working in the field of experimental electroacoustic music. Upon request Lev Theremin remove the name, the leaders of the center did not react. Lev Theremin had nothing to do with the creation of the center named after him.

Died November 3, 1993. As the newspapers later wrote: “At ninety-seven years old Lev Theremin went to those who made up the face of the era - but behind the coffin, except for daughters with their families and several men carrying the coffin, there was no one ... "

He invented:
1. Group of electric musical instruments:
-– theremin
-– rhythmikon
-– terpsiton
2. Security alarm
3. Unique eavesdropping system “Buran”
4. The world's first television installation - far-sightedness
worked on:
-– speech recognition system
- human freezing technology
-– voice identification in forensics
- military sonar.

He also developed the Alcatraz security system, a listening device and many other amazing things; on his own wave he returned from America to end up in the camps and, right during his imprisonment, came up with drones. We tell you who Lev Theremin is and why this man is a real phenomenon of the 20th century.

In one of the fragments of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon Cooper plays the theremin. He moves his hands near the instrument, and it, in turn, makes amazing sounds (video at the end of the article). Few people know that this instrument is the first in the world electronic music, invented by a Russian scientist with French roots, Lev Theremin.

Theremin and theremin

Back in the twenties of the last century, he presented his invention to Lenin, playing “The Swan” by Saint-Saëns on the theremin. In response, the admiring founder of the revolution asked him to teach him how to play an outlandish instrument. Soon Ilyich was famously performing Glinka’s “Lark”. Then there was fame, touring with symphony orchestra, laudatory odes in newspapers.

The father of the first synthesizer, Robert Muth, once said that Lev Theremin did for music what the Wright brothers did for aviation.

Theremin and television

More precisely, far-sightedness. In 1926, the scientist, along with the permanent concert activities, discovered a way to wirelessly transmit images over a distance. Actually, this was television. His name appeared in the press next to Edison’s, but then disappeared from the newspaper pages, and after that it was never included in any textbook.

One of the first scientists to develop the idea of creating television

And in general, regular television broadcasting in the Soviet Union started only in 1936. The reason, perhaps, was one incident that happened to a scientist: Theremin was invited to the carpet in the Kremlin, he pointed the lens of his device out the window, demonstrating far-sightedness, and Stalin appeared on the screen.

The big people jumped up together, screamed, got scared, and decided to classify far-sightedness, ban it, forget it and erase it from memory like a terrible nightmare, and send the scientist himself on tour to hell.

Theremin and abroad

First he traveled all over Europe. The work of Lev Theremin was admired greatest minds last century, including Einstein himself. He was called a real phenomenon of the twentieth century. Then there was a business trip to America, which dragged on for a good ten years. During this time, the scientist bought a Cadillac, created his own company for the production of electronic alarms and developed a security system for the famous Alcatraz and Sing Sing prisons.

Lev Theremin created a special instrument for his dancer wife

He rented a six-story mansion. He opened a music studio there, laboratories, workshops and a school for learning to play the theremin. The latter was already launched into mass production by the American music company.

His friends included George Gershwin, Maurice Ravel, Charlie Chaplin and the future President of the United States Dwight Eisenhower.

Lavinia Williams, 1961

In America, Termen first started an affair, and then stamped the passport of the dark-skinned beautiful dancer Lavinia Williams and invented terpsiton for her.

The essence of the instrument was as follows: a metal sheet was placed on the floor, and it worked as an antenna. The music appeared on its own during the dance from the movement. Isadora Duncan also danced on the terpsiton.

Lev Theremin and his inventions: camps, Buran and drones

Then Theremin was called back to Moscow and, of course, sent to Kolyma for eight years. The management felt that he had seen too much abroad. And he would have died if he had not come up with new rails for the wheelbarrow, with the help of which the crew at the quarry exceeded the quota several times.

US Ambassador to the UN Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (left) displays a panel with Theremin's listening device inside, 1960

There, in the camps, together with Korolev and Tupolev (they were sitting in the same sharashka), Lev Sergeevich designed radio-controlled drones and the Buran. The latter was the first listening device in history that did not require a power source.

In 1945, “Buran” was embedded in the image of the US seal and presented to the ambassador as a sign of friendship. After which, Soviet intelligence listened to Americans' conversations at the Moscow embassy for seven (!) years.

Obviously, it was for this that Termen became a laureate in 1947 Stalin Prize first degree, while still being a prisoner of the camp.

Soviet endovibrator inside a replica of the Great Seal of the United States, National Museum of Cryptography at the US National Security Agency

And finally, Theremin and immortality

The scientist, who died in 1993 at the age of 97 in complete poverty and oblivion, thought about the “Makropoulos remedy” even after the death of the leader of the world proletariat. Theremin repeatedly suggested freezing Ilyich and then bringing him back to life. In the 80s, the scientist returned to his idea of immortality, which is quite natural.

Only he failed to bring his theory of immortality to life.

He came up with the theory of "time microscopy". Its essence was that with age, a person’s red blood cells age. You just need to learn to separate them from the young ones. But geniuses, as we know, also make mistakes...

And finally, that same episode of “The Big Bang Theory” and Sheldon Cooper on the theremin:

LEV SERGEEVICH TERMEN (1896–1993)

Russian and Soviet inventor, creator of the original musical instrument- theremin

Lev Theremin was born on August 15 (August 28 - new style) 1896 in St. Petersburg into a noble Orthodox family with French Huguenot roots (in French the family surname was written as Theremin). His mother, Evgenia Antonovna, and his father, the famous lawyer Sergei Emilievich, spared no money on Lev’s education.

First independent experiments in electrical engineering, Lev Theremin carried out his studies at the St. Petersburg First Men's Gymnasium, from which he graduated in 1914 with a silver medal.

In 1916 he graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in cello, and at the same time studied at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University. At the university, Lev Theremin had the opportunity to listen to lectures on physics by private assistant professor A. F. Ioffe.

From his second year at the university, in 1916, he was drafted into the army and sent for accelerated training to the Nikolaev Engineering School, and then to officer electrical engineering courses.

Invented:

1. Group of electric musical instruments:

Theremin

Rhythmikon

Terpsitone

2. Security alarm

3. Unique eavesdropping system “Buran”

4. The world's first television installation - far vision

Worked on:

Speech recognition system

Human freezing technology

Military sonar

Died November 3, 1993. As the newspapers later wrote: “At ninety-seven years old, Lev Theremin went to those who made up the face of the era - but behind the coffin, except for his daughters with their families and several men carrying the coffin, there was no one ...”

He was buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery in Moscow.

THE MAN WHO COULD DO ANYTHING

On the evening of November 3, my friends and I drank a glass to commemorate the soul of the inventor and musician Lev Sergeevich Termen. I have never seen this man in my life, but I have been fascinated by his magical talent since childhood, when I first heard the amazing musical instrument theremin, from which all modern electronic music originated.

In the spring of 1926, engineer Lev Termen demonstrated at the People's Commissariat of Defense the world's first television installation - far vision. He installed the camera lens on the street, placed the screen in his office, and the Red commanders Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, Budyonny and Tukhachevsky cried out in delight: on the screen Stalin was walking across the yard!

It took Termen only a year to solve a fantastic problem - the creation of electrical foresight. However, for him, it seemed, there were no difficulties in life at all. WITH youth he amazed those around him with his talents: he was fond of mathematics, physics, and something was always exploding in his room. At the university, Theremin studied simultaneously in the physics and astronomy faculties, while simultaneously studying cello at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

Before the revolution, he managed to graduate from a military engineering school and even fought for the Tsar Father with the rank of second lieutenant in a radio engineering battalion. But the Bolsheviks did not shoot him, but, on the contrary, took him into service in the electrical battalion. And a year later he was appointed head of the most powerful radio station in the country, the Tsarskoye Selo radio station.

After demobilization in 1920, he was invited to work at the Physico-Technical Institute by Professor Ioffe. Theremin receives the task of doing radio measurements of the dielectric constant of gases at variable temperatures and pressures. During testing, it turned out that the device produced a sound, the height and strength of which depended on the position of the hand between the plates of the capacitor. Perhaps a simple physicist would not have attached any importance to this, but a physicist who graduated from the conservatory tried to compose a melody from these sounds. And it worked!

Thus was born the musical instrument theremin - the voice of Theremin. And a simplified version of the theremin - a security alarm - built on the same principle: as soon as the attacker found himself in the electric field, a sound signal was heard. By the way, in our time, expensive cars are still equipped with an alarm system, which is based on Theremin’s invention.

And in the life of Lev Sergeevich it became the first step on the path to fame. Although his colleagues chuckled: “Theremin plays Gluck on a voltmeter,” this did not bother the scientist at all. In 1921, he demonstrates his invention at the VIII All-Russian Electrotechnical Congress. The surprise of the audience knew no bounds - no strings or keys, a timbre unlike anything else. The Pravda newspaper published an enthusiastic review, radio concerts were held for wide audience. In addition, during the congress the GOELRO plan was adopted, and Theremin, with his unique power tools, could become an excellent propagandist for the plan for electrification of the entire country.

A few months after the congress, Termen was invited to the Kremlin.

Stop, whoever is coming!

In addition to Lenin, there were about ten other people in the office. First, Theremin showed the high commission a security alarm. He connected the device to a large vase with a flower, and as soon as one of those present approached it, a loud bell rang. Lev Sergeevich recalled: “One of the military says that this is wrong. Lenin asked: “Why is it wrong?” And the military man took a warm hat, put it on his head, wrapped his arm and leg in a fur coat and began to slowly crawl towards my alarm on his haunches. We got the signal again."

And yet the main “hero” of the audience was the theremin. Lenin liked the instrument so much that he gave the go-ahead for Theremin to tour and ordered that he be given a free railway ticket“to popularize the new instrument” throughout the country.

By the way, another impressive feature of Theremin’s life is connected with Lenin.

Lev Sergeevich was passionate about the idea of fighting death. He studied studies of animal cells frozen in permafrost, and wondered what would happen to people if they were frozen and then thawed. When news of the leader’s death became known, Theremin sent his assistant to Gorki with a proposal to freeze Lenin’s body so that years later, when the technology had been worked out, he could be resurrected from the dead. But the assistant returned with sad news: the internal organs had already been removed and the body was prepared for embalming. With that, Theremin abandoned research on human revitalization. And decades later, his idea was embodied in America, and now dozens of frozen lucky people are waiting for resurrection.

An episode that could have been a milestone

After demonstrating the television installation at the People's Commissariat for Education, Theremin showed it on V All-Union Congress physicists in Moscow. The invention caused a sensation, Ogonyok and Izvestia wrote with delight: “Theremin’s name is included in the history of world science along with Popov and Edison!” It seemed that it was a stone's throw from experiment to serial production...

Theremin was offered to create a television system for border military units. But it did not reach the army: the country’s technical base was too poor.

Therefore, the developments were kept secret, and the title of pioneer in the field of television a few years later went to an emigrant from Russia, Vladimir Zvorykin.

Knocked out "Grand Opera" and others

In the summer of 1927, an international conference on physics and electronics was held in Frankfurt am Main. The young Country of Soviets needed to present itself with dignity. And Theremin with his instrument became the trump card of the Russian delegation. He amazed the Europeans with his report on the theremin and his concerts classical music for the general public: “heavenly music”, “voices of angels” - the newspapers were choking with delight.

Invitations from Berlin, London, and Paris followed one after another. Theremin's most enchanting concert took place in Paris: the conservative Grand Opera theater for the first time in its history gave the hall to some unknown Russian for the whole evening. Such an influx of spectators (even standing tickets for boxes were sold) and such success in the theater have not been seen for 35 years...

Meanwhile, Joffe, who was in the USA at that time, received orders from several companies to produce 2000 theremins with the condition that Theremin would come to America to supervise the work. But instead of one business trip, Lev Sergeevich received two: from the People’s Commissar of Education Lunacharsky and from the Military Department.

Trump on the table!

And now the handsome young Lev Theremin sails on the ocean liner Majestic to America. The world-famous violinist József Sighetti, who was sailing on the same ship, became envious of the fees that the largest businessmen in America offered Theremin for the honor of being the first to hear the theremin. But the inventor gave the first concert for the press, scientists and famous musicians. The success was impressive, and with permission Soviet authorities Theremin founded the Teletouch studio company in New York for the production of theremins.

Things went brilliantly. Theremin concerts took place in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Boston. Thousands of Americans enthusiastically began to learn to play the theremin, and General Electric Corporation and RCA (Radio Corporation of America) bought licenses to produce it.

Erupted at the turn of the 30s " great crisis"ruined many rich people. But he didn’t knock Theremin down. Of course, the people had no time for music, but the inventive Russian had one more trump card - a security alarm. Teletouch Corporation quickly refocused on its production, and Theremin volume sensors were torn off with their hands. They were even installed in the terrible US prison Sing Sing and in Fort Knox, where the American gold reserves were kept. So everything was fine with business, but there was a crisis in the music field.

Cake for a violinist with a theremin

In the enthusiastic chorus of Theremin's fans, voices of dissatisfaction began to be heard: at concerts he was shamelessly out of tune. The fact is that playing the theremin purely is incredibly difficult: the performer has no reference points (like, for example, the keys of a piano or the strings of a violin) and has to rely solely on hearing and muscle memory.

Theremin clearly lacked performing skills. A virtuoso was needed here. And then fate brought him together with a young emigrant from Russia, Clara Reisenberg. As a child, she was known as a miracle child, a violinist with a great future. But either she overplayed her hands, or because of a hungry childhood, she had to part with the violin: her muscles could not withstand the load. But the theremin was within reach, and Clara quickly learned to play it. It didn't go without whirlwind romance, especially since Theremin was free by that time.

For the first time, Theremin married the lovely Katya Konstantinova in 1921, and before coming to America, their family life was smooth and stable. But in New York, Katya was able to find work only in the suburbs and came home once a week. After six months of such “family” life, a young man came to Theremin and said that he and Katya loved each other. And then it became known that the visitor was a member of a fascist organization. And the Soviet embassy demanded that Termen divorce his wife. Which is what he did. Therefore, by the time of his meeting with Clara, Lev Sergeevich was open to new love.

He is 38 years old, she is 18. They were a luxurious couple, they loved to go to cafes and restaurants. Lev Sergeevich courted her very beautifully and loved to surprise his girlfriend with various miracles. For example, for her birthday, he gave her a cake that rotated around its axis and was decorated with a candle that lit up when approaching it.

The beautiful romance was not destined to end with a wedding. Clara chose someone else - Robert Rockmore, a lawyer and successful impresario, so she music career was provided.

Why do walls float?

And Theremin plunged headlong into his work. Upon his arrival in America, he rented a six-story mansion on 54th Avenue for 99 years. In addition to personal apartments, it housed a workshop and a studio. Here Lev Sergeevich often played music with Albert Einstein: the physicist on the violin, the inventor on the theremin. Einstein was fascinated by the idea of combining music and spatial images. And Theremin figured out how to do this: he invented the rhythmicon, a light-musical instrument. Huge transparent wheels with geometric pattern rotated in front of a stroboscopic lamp. As soon as the musician changed pitches

Sound, the frequency of strobe flashes and patterns changed - the spectacle was impressive. Well, the fantasy began when the studio walls rose and fell. Of course, not for real, but with the help of a trick of light. The spellbound visitors gasped in surprise!

Rumors about these experiments attracted many famous people to the studio. Among Theremin's guests were millionaires DuPont, Ford and Rockefeller. However, Termen himself by the mid-30s was included in the list of twenty-five celebrities of the world. And he was even a member of the millionaires' club.

Was he really a millionaire? It is not known for certain. Some say that it’s a huge amount of money for Theremin personally and Soviet Russia brought by Teletouch Corporation. And others claim that Theremin financed military intelligence. Because the true purpose of his business trip to America was espionage activity.

Famous spy

Every two weeks Lev Sergeevich came to a small country cafe, where two young men were waiting for him. They listened to his reports and gave him new tasks. However, these tasks were not burdensome and did not particularly distract Theremin from his work. And he was already completely captivated by the most fantastic of his ideas - an instrument that gave birth to music from dance. In fact, this is a type of theremin: the sound is created not only by the hands, but also by the movements of the whole body, and the name was given to it accordingly - terpsiton - after the goddess of dance Terpsichore. In this case, each sound corresponded to a lamp of a certain color. Can you imagine what an extraordinary spectacle it was, because any movement of the dancer was echoed by sounds and the flickering of multi-colored lights!

For creating concert program Theremin invited a group of dancers from the African American Ballet Company. Unfortunately, it was not possible to achieve harmony and accuracy from them, and the project had to be postponed. But in this troupe danced the beautiful mulatto Lavinia Williams, who captivated Lev Sergeevich not only as a ballerina, but also as a woman. Theremin decided to get married.

It could never have occurred to him that marriage with dark-skinned woman will radically change his life. But as soon as the lovers registered their marriage, the doors of many houses in New York were closed to Theremin: America did not yet know political correctness. He lost informants, which caused serious dissatisfaction with Soviet intelligence. And in 1938, Theremin was ordered to immediately leave for Russia. Lavinia was told that she would come to her husband on the next ship.

The spouses did not see each other again. Until the end of his days, Theremin kept the marriage certificate issued Russian embassy in America.

Kirov's killer

Ten years after leaving Russia, Theremin arrived in Leningrad. And it turned out that no one needed him: there were almost no old workers left at the Physico-Technical Institute. Theremin went to look for work in Moscow, but on March 15, they came for him to a hotel near the Kievsky railway station with an arrest warrant.

In the Butyrka prison, the investigator told Theremin that he, as a defector, would, of course, be shot if he did not cooperate. A month later, Theremin “confessed” that, together with a group of astronomers, he was planning the murder of Kirov. His version was this: Kirov (who was already dead by that time!) was going to visit the Pulkovo Observatory. Astronomers planted a landmine in a Foucault pendulum. And Theremin, using a radio signal from the USA, was supposed to blow it up as soon as Kirov approached the pendulum. The investigator was not even embarrassed by the fact that Foucault’s pendulum is not in Pulkovo, but in the Kazan Cathedral! Lev Sergeevich was given eight years and sent to Kolyma.

But Termen spent only a year in the camp. He was appointed senior over the criminals who carried stones from the mountain and paved the road with them. Theremin mechanized the process by building a wheelbarrow with a monorail. Work is in full swing! The brigade's rations were tripled, and the papers about the unusual prisoner were sent to Moscow.

In the winter of 1940, he was transferred to Omsk, to the Tupolev aviation sharashka, where throughout the war he developed equipment for radio control of unmanned aircraft and radio beacons for naval operations. But the crowning achievement of his time in the sharashka was the invention of the Buran listening system.

Trojan horse from the pioneers

...On Independence Day, July 4, 1945, the American Ambassador to Russia Averell Harriman received a wooden panel depicting an eagle as a gift from Soviet pioneers. The panel was hung in the ambassador's office. And then the American intelligence services lost peace: a mysterious information leak began. Only 7 years later, a mysterious cylinder with a membrane inside was discovered inside the gift. For a year and a half, engineers struggled to solve this trick. The secret turned out to be simple: an invisible ray was directed from the house opposite to the office window, and the membrane, oscillating in time with the speech, reflected it back, and it was recorded on a special device.

Then Theremin improved his Buran so much that the membrane was no longer needed - its role was played by window glass. Rumor has it that Buran is still in service with our secret services.

The Soviet government highly appreciated the merits of the inventor - in 1947, the prisoner (!) was awarded the Stalin Prize, 1st degree. And after his release, Termen was given a two-room apartment on Leninsky Prospekt.

It seemed that the stupid and evil misunderstanding was over and now the inventor would be showered with honors. But Theremin did not receive any official titles; all his patents were covered with the stamp “Owls.” secret." And Lev Sergeevich continued to work in secret KGB laboratories. Soon he found himself there new wife- a young typist Masha Gushchina, who gave birth to twin daughters.

For almost twenty years, Theremin was engaged in specific developments for the all-powerful department. At first it was promising work- speech recognition systems, voice identification, military hydroacoustics. But over time, priorities have changed. As Theremin recalled, “supposedly in the West they came up with devices for determining where flying saucers were, and we also had to struggle with similar devices. I understood that this was a scam, and I couldn’t refuse - and one day I decided that it was better to retire.”

The employers did not object, considering that they could not take anything from the old man, and in 1964 Termen finally parted with the special services, under whose invisible eye he had been for almost 40 years.

Theremin doesn't die!

70 years old. It seemed like life was over. But Lev Sergeevich, true to his motto “Theremin does not die!” (this is how his last name is read backwards), gets a job in the acoustic laboratory of the Moscow State Conservatory. Nothing disturbed the old man’s measured life until, in 1968, a New York Times correspondent, preparing a report on the Moscow Conservatory, learned that the great Theremin was alive.

This sensational news in America was perceived as a resurrection from the dead: in all American encyclopedias It was stated that Theremin died in 1938. A flood of letters from his overseas friends poured into Lev Sergeevich’s name, and reporters from various newspapers and television companies tried to meet with him. The conservative authorities, frightened by such interest in the modest person of the mechanic, simply fired him. And all the equipment was thrown into the trash.

For the last twenty-five years, Theremin has worked in the acoustics laboratory of Moscow State University. Mechanic 6th category. He slowly worked on his theremins - he restored some, improved some, and even came up with one in which the sound through a system of photocells arose from just the musician’s glance.

Lev Sergeevich also frequented the Scriabin Museum, where he took part in the creation of a musical synthesizer. The long-awaited time has come - the era of electronic instruments. Theremin seemed to catch ideas out of thin air that sometimes seemed utopian. And later it turned out that the Japanese company Yamaha was working on these ideas independently of him.

Well, Lev Sergeevich taught his niece Lida Kavina to play the theremin. By the age of twenty, she had become a virtuoso performer and toured all over Europe with concerts. In 1989, Theremin was invited to the Experimental Music Festival in France. And he, 93 years old, went!

But most of all, at the end of his life, Termen surprised those around him with his entry into the CPSU: “I promised Lenin.” Lev Sergeevich tried before, but for “terrible crimes” he was not accepted into the party. So Termen became a communist only in 1991, simultaneously with the fall of the USSR.

a swan song

...In 1951, the future American director Steve Martin saw the film “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” But it was not the aliens that shocked him, but the unearthly sound of the theremin that accompanied the action. For several years he communicated with his brother using sounds similar to those produced by a theremin. And many years later, in 1980, Steve Martin was looking for music for his film. And his search led him to Clara Rockmore, who told the director about the legendary inventor. It was then that Martin had the idea to create a documentary film about Theremin. But 11 years passed before he was able to come to Moscow, meet Theremin and invite him to America. The elderly maestro walked confusedly through the streets of New York and had difficulty recognizing the places where ten years of his life had passed. The most exciting thing was the meeting with Clara Rockmore. Clara did not agree to her for a long time - years, they say, do not make a woman beautiful.

Hey, Clarenok, how old are we! - said 95-year-old Theremin.

After America, he went back to the Netherlands for the Schoenberg-Kandinsky festival, and, returning to Moscow, found his room in a communal apartment in complete destruction - broken furniture, broken equipment, trampled records. Apparently, one of the neighbors really needed his room. The daughter took Lev Sergeevich to her place. But his vitality dried up, and a few months later, on November 3, 1993, Theremin died.

Steve Martin's film "The Electronic Odyssey of Lev Theremin" was released after the death of the hero. But his theremins still live today. Among the many companies producing them is Moog Mugic, owned by the inventor of the first synthesizer, Robert Moog. He once said about Theremin: “He’s just a genius who is capable of anything!”

He failed in only one thing - to become national pride Russia...

Svetlana BAZHENOVA.

ღ The same Lev Theremin: Inventor, physicist, musician ღ

An old man lived in Moscow in a terrible bedbug-infested communal apartment opposite the Cheryomushkinsky market. When the neighbors needed his pitiful closet, in the old man’s absence they destroyed his property, broke his things, and destroyed his records. The old man was forced to move in with his daughter, but he became so ill from all this that, as was to be expected, he soon died. To the joy of the neighbors in the communal apartment: the room has become free.
Living space. I used it and that's enough.

So what? - you ask. - The story is ordinary.
It’s not the same in communal apartments, the neighbors could have left the old man and so on...
Just think - how long did they wait until he square meters will be freed, they themselves have already grown old.

And the old man may have come from somewhere else. And the old man was a grandfather for a reason; he lives in communal apartments for thousands.
And it was Lev Theremin.

THE SAME LION TERMAN!

TERMEN Lev Sergeevich (1896-1993) - inventor, physicist, musician.
Creator of the world's first electronic musical instrument, the theremin (1919-20); one of the first long-range television systems (1925-26); the world's first rhythm machine, Rhythmikon (1932); security alarm systems, automatic doors and lighting; the first and most advanced listening devices, etc.
Born in 1896 in St. Petersburg. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in cello and studied at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University.

Since 1919 - head of the laboratory of the Physico-Technical Institute in Petrograd, at the same time since 1923. - collaborated with GIMN (State Institute of Music Science, Moscow).
In 1927, he was sent by the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR on a foreign business trip. He traveled all over Europe, was one of the most popular people in New York, and was part of the millionaires' club. In 1931-38 - Director of the joint stock company Teletouch Inc. (USA). Such outstanding people of their time as emigrant Albert Einstein, conductor Leopold Stokowski, actor Charlie Chaplin, artist Marie Hélène Bute, etc. visited and worked in his New York studio. and so on. His inventions, made in the 20-40s, have firmly entered our everyday life.

At the end of 1938 he returned to the USSR. Arrested in 1939 and sentenced to 8 years in the camps. He spends a year in Kolyma, but most of the time in the legendary Tupolev sharashka. After his release, he worked at the KGB research center, developing various electronic systems.

Since 1963 - employee acoustic laboratory Moscow Conservatory. In the late 60s, due to disagreements with the administration after the publication of an article about Theremin in the American newspaper The New York Times, Lev Sergeevich was expelled from the conservatory with a scandal, and he was forced to go to work at Moscow State University.

Since 1966 - employee of the Department of Acoustics, Faculty of Physics, Moscow State University.

Lev Theremin died in 93 in poverty and obscurity, hounded by his neighbors in a communal apartment. The legendary Theremin...
His most widely known invention is the theremin, which Lenin liked. Playing the theremin involves the musician changing the distance from his hands to the antennas of the instrument, due to which the capacitance changes oscillatory circuit and, as a consequence, the frequency of sound.

The vertical straight antenna is responsible for the tone of the sound, the horizontal horseshoe-shaped antenna is responsible for its volume.

To play the theremin you must have perfect pitch, since the musician does not touch the instrument while playing.
But not only the theremin...

He invented:

1. Group of electric musical instruments:
-– theremin
-– rhythmikon
-– terpsiton
2. Security alarm
3. Unique eavesdropping system “Buran”
4. The world's first television installation - far-sightedness
worked on:
-– speech recognition system
- human freezing technology
-– voice identification in forensics
- military sonar.

Already in 26, he demonstrated television in the Kremlin.
At that time, televisions were created with screens the size of a matchbox, and his television had a huge screen (1.5 x 1.5 m) and a resolution of 100 lines.

In 1927, the scientist demonstrated his installation to Soviet military leaders K.E. Voroshilov, I.V. Tukhachevsky and SM. Budyonny:
State minds watched in horror on the screen Stalin walking through the Kremlin courtyard.

This picture frightened them so much that the invention was immediately classified... and safely buried in the archives, and television was soon invented by the Americans.

Theremin amazed the world scientific community with his theremin, on which he himself (and in addition to physics, he also graduated from the conservatory) gave concerts of classical music.
“Heavenly music”, “voices of angels” - the bourgeois press moaned with delight.
The USSR received orders from several companies for the production of 2000 theremins with the condition that Theremin would come to America to supervise the work.
But instead of one task, Lev Sergeevich received two: one from the People’s Commissar of Education Lunacharsky and the second from the military department.

Upon his arrival in America, he rented a six-story mansion on 54th Avenue for 99 years. In addition to personal apartments, it housed a workshop and a studio. Here Lev Sergeevich often played music with Albert Einstein: the physicist on the violin, the inventor on the theremin. Einstein was fascinated by the idea of combining music and spatial images. And Theremin figured out how to do this: he invented the rhythmicon, a light-musical instrument. Huge transparent wheels with a geometric pattern printed on them rotated in front of a strobe light. As soon as the musician changed the pitch of the sound, the frequency of the strobe flashes and the patterns changed - the spectacle was impressive. Well, the fantasy began when the walls of the studio rose and fell. Of course, not for real, but with the help of a trick of light. The spellbound visitors gasped in surprise!

Was he really a millionaire? It is not known for certain. Some say that Teletouch Corporation brought huge amounts of money to Theremin personally and to Soviet Russia. And others claim that Theremin was financed by military intelligence. Because the true purpose of his business trip to America was espionage activity.

Every two weeks Lev Sergeevich came to a small country cafe, where two young men were waiting for him. They listened to his reports and gave him new tasks. However, these tasks were not burdensome and did not particularly distract Theremin from his work. And he was already completely carried away by the most fantastic of his ideas - an instrument that gave birth to music from dance. In fact, this is a type of theremin: the sound is created not only by the hands, but also by the movements of the whole body, and the name was given to it accordingly - terpsiton - after the goddess of dance Terpsichore. In this case, each sound corresponded to a lamp of a certain color. Can you imagine what an extraordinary spectacle it was, because any movement of the dancer was echoed by sounds and the flickering of multi-colored lights!

To create a concert program, Theremin invited a group of dancers from the African American Ballet Company. Unfortunately, it was not possible to achieve harmony and accuracy from them, and the project had to be postponed. But in this troupe danced the beautiful mulatto Lavinia Williams, who captivated Lev Sergeevich not only as a ballerina, but also as a woman. Theremin decided to get married.

It never occurred to him that marriage to a black woman would radically change his life. But as soon as the lovers registered their marriage, the doors of many houses in New York were closed to Theremin: America did not yet know political correctness. He lost informants, which caused serious dissatisfaction with Soviet intelligence. And in 1938, Theremin was ordered to immediately leave for Russia. Lavinia was told that she would come to her husband on the next ship.

The spouses did not see each other again. And Termen kept the marriage certificate issued by the Russian embassy in America until the end of his days.

The “Great Depression” that broke out at the turn of the 1930s ruined many.
But not Theremin: the inventive scientist had one more trump card - a security alarm.

Theremin sensors were torn off by hand. They were even installed in Sing Sing prison and Fort Knox, where the American gold reserves were kept.
Thousands of Americans enthusiastically began to learn to play the theremin, and General Electric Corporation and RCA (Radio Corporation of America) bought licenses to produce it.
By the mid-30s, Theremin was included in the list of twenty-five celebrities in the world and was a member of the millionaires' club.

Astronomers planted a landmine in a Foucault pendulum.
And Theremin, with a radio signal from the USA (!!!), was supposed to blow it up as soon as Kirov approached the pendulum (!).
The investigator was not even embarrassed by the fact that Foucault’s pendulum is not in Pulkovo, but in the Kazan Cathedral.

Lev Sergeevich was given eight years and sent to Kolyma.
In the camp, he immediately invented a self-propelled car on a monorail, and he was soon taken to Tupolev’s so-called “sharashka,” where he had Sergei Pavlovich Korolev as his assistant.
The war began and he developed radio control equipment for unmanned aircraft and radio beacons for naval operations.
But not only. Termen also developed the famous “Buran” eavesdropping system in this sharashka.
They say it is still in use.

The crown of this creation was a wooden panel, which American Ambassador donated by Soviet pioneers.
The panel was hung in the ambassador's office, and... soon they began to look for where the colossal information leak was coming from.
Only seven (!) years later, a cylinder with a membrane was discovered in this panel.
For another year and a half, American intelligence engineers struggled with the riddle - what is it?..

But it turned out that a beam was directed from the house opposite to the office window, and the membrane, oscillating in time with the speech, reflected it back.
Along with the speech, which was recorded.

Subsequently, Theremin further improved the invention: it was possible to do without even a membrane; its role was played by window glass.
The Soviet authorities were so delighted with this useful invention that they awarded Termen the Stalin Prize, 1st degree, right in prison.
And then they even released me, which was simply an outstanding act of humanism and triumph of socialist legality, so dear to some.
And they even made him happy with two rooms of that same “free living space.”

Well, who wouldn’t agree that Lev Theremin was given two rooms for free? Of course, he was literally gifted. Has he earned enough for this country to earn two little rooms?

In the 60s, L. Theremin again wanted to take up electronic music, but some party and KGB mug simply spat in his eyes, pointing out that “electricity exists to execute traitors, and not to create music.”
These were the thinkers who decided the fate of science in the country in general and the brilliant inventor Theremin in particular.
Of course, he remained strictly classified and continued to work for intelligence, because they would not hire him anywhere else.
At first he was engaged in military hydroacoustics, and then he was tasked with developing a “device for searching for flying saucers.”
Such idiocy did not inspire him at all, and in 64 he finally left the organs and began to quietly and peacefully work in the acoustic laboratory of the Moscow Conservatory.

Yes, it would have worked if the New York Times correspondent had not been inspired to make a report about the conservatory.
And there the correspondent came across Lev Theremin. The whole world was sure that he died in 1938, ground into the meat grinder of millions of repressions.

When the USA found out that the great Theremin was alive, it was a bomb. Sensation. Akhtung. Paragraph.
The scientific community of America and Europe literally roared.
An avalanche of letters from scientists and colleagues poured in to Theremin; reporters and television companies flocked to him...

He was invited to Stanford, to Paris, to Holland, to Sweden...
The leadership of the conservatory was so afraid of all this that...
Theremin was simply fired, and his equipment and developments were thrown into the trash.

And he developed a synthesizer, which was soon successfully developed by the Japanese Yamaha, earning millions and millions from it...

And for the next 25 years, the great scientist, probably not inferior in talent to Leonardo himself, the legendary inventor, whom Lenin praised and Einstein respected, worked as a 6th category mechanic in some run-of-the-mill laboratory.

Lived with family in two-room apartment, probably watched TV - which he was not allowed to invent - and on TV concerts of rock stars on Yamaha synthesizers.

The daughters grew up, started their own families, and five of them lived in a small two-room apartment on Leninsky Prospekt -
L. S. Termen, daughter Natalya with her husband and two children.
With great difficulty, he managed to get another room in a bedbug communal apartment, where his neighbors hounded him.”

Lev Sergeevich taught his niece Lida Kavina to play the theremin. By the age of twenty, she had become a virtuoso performer and toured all over Europe with concerts. In 1989, Theremin was invited to the Experimental Music Festival in France. And he, 93 years old, went!

When in 1991 a Hamburg theater decided to use a theremin, it turned out that practically the only performer in Europe was Lydia Kavina. Over the past years, the situation has changed a lot: playing the theremin is taught in universities, and in different countries festivals are held around the world.

October 10, 2004. Jean-Michel Jarre organizes another phantasmagoria in the Forbidden City in Beijing.

Theater of Archetypes by Irina Cheglova in faces. Introducing: A magician hiding behind the mask of a Jester or Lev Theremin.

On December 31, 2015, a concert of organ music was held in St. Andrew's Cathedral in Moscow, where the organ met the theremin, the invention of a very interesting compatriot of ours. The voice of the instrument created by Lev Theremin seems to have come from oblivion and led us to heaven. This is the name of the performed composition. Who is this man, Lev Theremin? Wizard, spy, man with a capital M?

TERMEN Lev Sergeevich (1896-1993) - inventor, physicist, musician.

Creator of the world's first electronic musical instrument, the theremin (1919-20); one of the first long-range television systems (1925-26); the world's first rhythm machine, Rhythmikon (1932); security alarm systems, automatic doors and lighting; the first and most advanced listening devices, etc.
Born in 1896 in St. Petersburg. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in cello and studied at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University.
Since 1919 - head of the laboratory of the Physico-Technical Institute in Petrograd, at the same time since 1923. - collaborated with GIMN (State Institute of Music Science, Moscow).
In 1927, he was sent by the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR on a foreign business trip. He traveled all over Europe, was one of the most popular people in New York, and was part of the millionaires' club. In 1931-38 - Director of the joint stock company Teletouch Inc. (USA). Such outstanding people of their time as emigrant Albert Einstein, conductor Leopold Stokowski, actor Charlie Chaplin, artist Marie Hélène Bute, etc. visited and worked in his New York studio. and so on. His inventions, made in the 20-40s, have firmly entered our everyday life.
At the end of 1938 he returned to the USSR. Arrested in 1939 and sentenced to 8 years in the camps. He spends a year in Kolyma, but most of the time in the legendary Tupolev sharashka. After his release, he worked at the KGB research center, developing various electronic systems.
Since 1963 - employee of the acoustic laboratory of the Moscow Conservatory. In the late 60s, due to disagreements with the administration after the publication of an article about Theremin in the American newspaper The New York Times, Lev Sergeevich was expelled from the conservatory with a scandal, and he was forced to go to work at Moscow State University.
Since 1966 - employee of the Department of Acoustics, Faculty of Physics, Moscow State University.

His most widely known invention is the theremin, which Lenin liked. Playing the theremin involves the musician changing the distance from his hands to the antennas of the instrument, due to which the capacitance of the oscillating circuit and, as a result, the frequency of the sound changes.

The vertical straight antenna is responsible for the tone of the sound, the horizontal horseshoe-shaped antenna is responsible for its volume.

To play the theremin, you must have perfect pitch, since the musician does not touch the instrument while playing.

But not only the theremin...

He invented:

1. Group of electric musical instruments:
◊ theremin
◊ rhythmikon
◊ terpsiton

2. Security alarm

3. Unique eavesdropping system “Buran”

4. The world's first television installation - far vision
worked on:

◊ speech recognition system
◊ human freezing technology
◊ voice identification in forensics
◊ military sonar.

Already in 26, he demonstrated television in the Kremlin.

At that time, televisions were created with screens the size of a matchbox, and his television had a huge screen (1.5 x 1.5 m) and a resolution of 100 lines.
In 1927, the scientist demonstrated his installation to Soviet military leaders K.E. Voroshilov, I.V. Tukhachevsky and SM. Budyonny:
State minds watched in horror on the screen Stalin walking through the Kremlin courtyard.

This picture frightened them so much that the invention was immediately classified... and safely buried in the archives, and television was soon invented by the Americans.

Every two weeks Lev Sergeevich came to a small country cafe, where two young men were waiting for him. They listened to his reports and gave him new tasks. However, these tasks were not burdensome and did not particularly distract Theremin from his work. And he was already completely carried away by the most fantastic of his ideas - an instrument that gave birth to music from dance. In fact, this is a type of theremin: the sound is created not only by the hands, but also by the movements of the whole body, and the name was given to it accordingly - terpsiton - after the goddess of dance Terpsichore. In this case, each sound corresponded to a lamp of a certain color. Can you imagine what an extraordinary spectacle it was, because any movement of the dancer was echoed by sounds and the flickering of multi-colored lights!

The spouses did not see each other again. And Termen kept the marriage certificate issued by the Russian embassy in America until the end of his days.

In Moscow he was arrested as a “defector”, and after a month of skillful processing by socialist legality at Lubyanka, Lev Termen confessed everything.
For example, in the fact that, together with a group of astronomers, he planned the murder of Kirov.
The version was like this:
Kirov (who by that time was already long dead!) was going to visit the Pulkovo Observatory.
Astronomers planted a landmine in a Foucault pendulum.
And Theremin, with a radio signal from the USA (!!!), was supposed to blow it up as soon as Kirov approached the pendulum (!).
The investigator was not even embarrassed by the fact that Foucault’s pendulum is not in Pulkovo, but in the Kazan Cathedral.
Lev Sergeevich was given eight years and sent to Kolyma.
In the camp, he immediately invented a self-propelled car on a monorail, and he was soon taken to Tupolev’s so-called “sharashka,” where he had Sergei Pavlovich Korolev as his assistant.
The war began and he developed radio control equipment for unmanned aircraft and radio beacons for naval operations.
But not only. Termen also developed the famous “Buran” eavesdropping system in this sharashka.
They say it is still in use.

The crowning achievement of this creation was a wooden panel that was given to the American ambassador by Soviet pioneers.
The panel was hung in the ambassador's office, and... soon they began to look for where the colossal information leak was coming from.
Only seven (!) years later, a cylinder with a membrane was discovered in this panel.
For another year and a half, American intelligence engineers struggled with the riddle - what is it?..
But it turned out that a beam was directed from the house opposite to the office window, and the membrane, oscillating in time with the speech, reflected it back.
Along with the speech, which was recorded.
Subsequently, Theremin further improved the invention: it was possible to do without even a membrane; its role was played by window glass.
The Soviet authorities were so delighted with this useful invention that they awarded Termen the Stalin Prize, 1st degree, right in prison.
And then they even released me, which was simply an outstanding act of humanism and the triumph of socialist legality, so dear to some.

From 1964 to 1967, Theremin worked in the laboratory of the Moscow Conservatory, devoting all his efforts to the development of new electric musical instruments, as well as the restoration of everything that he managed to invent in the 1930s. According to some reports, during this period Theremin worked “on a voluntary basis”, for free.
In 1967 musical critic Harold Schonberg found himself at the conservatory and recognized the man he met there as Lev Theremin. The news was published in The New York Times, and the publication of the “bourgeois press” aroused the indignation of Soviet leaders. Theremin’s studio was closed, “all his instruments were chopped up with an ax and thrown away,” he was fired from the conservatory (according to other sources, he retired).
It was not without difficulty that he got a job in a laboratory at the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University. In the main building of Moscow State University, he held seminars for those who wanted to listen to his work and study the theremin; Only a few people attended the seminars. Formally, Theremin was listed as a mechanic at the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University, but in fact continued to work independently. Scientific research. Active scientific activity L. S. Termen’s work continued almost until his death.
In 1989, a trip took place (together with her daughter, Natalia Theremin) to a festival in the city of Bourges (France).
In 1991, together with his daughter, Natalia Termen and granddaughter, Olga Termen, he visited the United States at the invitation of Stanford University and there, among other things, he met Clara Rockmore.

In 1992, unknown persons destroyed a laboratory room on Lomonosovsky Prospekt (the room was allocated by the Moscow authorities at the request of Valentina Grizodubova), all his instruments were broken, and part of the archives were stolen. The police did not solve the crime.

In 1992, the Theremin Center was created in Moscow, with its main goal being to support musicians and sound artists working in the field of experimental electroacoustic music. The center's leaders did not respond to Lev Termen's request to remove his name. Lev Theremin had nothing to do with the creation of the center named after him.

In 1993, Lev Theremin died. As the newspapers later wrote: “At ninety-seven years old, Lev Theremin went to those who made up the face of the era - but behind the coffin, except for his daughters with their families and several men carrying the coffin, there was no one ...”
He was buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery in Moscow.

Currently, Natalia Termen continues her work to develop the maximum musical capabilities and performing culture of the theremin.

Interesting Facts:

The operating principles underlying the theremin were also used by Theremin when creating a security system that reacts to a person approaching a protected object. The Kremlin and the Hermitage, and later foreign museums, were equipped with such a system.

In 1921, Lev Theremin met with Lenin at the VIII All-Russian Electrotechnical Congress. Theremin's invention delighted Lenin, and in 1922 they met in the Kremlin.

On February 9, 1945, US Ambassador Averell Harriman, who was invited to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Artek pioneer camp, was presented with a wooden panel made from valuable wood species (sandalwood, boxwood, sequoia, ivory palm, Persian parrotia, mahogany and ebony, black alder) , featuring the Great Seal of the United States. An eavesdropping device developed by Theremin, the Zlatoust endovibrator, was installed in it, which made it possible to listen to conversations in the ambassador’s office for almost 8 years. The design of the “bug” turned out to be so successful that when examining the gift, the American intelligence services did not notice anything. After its discovery, the “bug” was presented to the UN as evidence of the intelligence activities of the USSR, but the principle of its operation remained unsolved for several years.

In 1946, Theremin was nominated for the Stalin Prize of the second degree. But Stalin, who endorsed the lists of those awarded, personally corrected the second degree to the first. In 1947, Theremin became a laureate of the Stalin Prize of the first degree.

In 1991, at the age of 95, a few months before the collapse of the USSR, Lev Theremin joined the CPSU. He explained his decision by saying that he had once made a promise to Lenin to join the party, and that he wanted to hurry to fulfill his promise while it still existed. To join the CPSU, Lev Sergeevich, at the age of 90, came to the party committee of Moscow State University, where he was told that to join the party he had to study at the department of Marxism-Leninism for a year, which he did, passing all the exams.

Until his death, Lev Theremin was full of energy and even joked that he was immortal. As proof, he suggested reading his last name backwards: “Theremin does not die.”

In 1989, a meeting took place in Moscow between the two founders of electronic music, Lev Sergeevich Termen and the English musician Brian Eno.

Using the theremin in 1963, the original theme song series "Doctor Who".