To most Americans, the name of Leon Theremin brings to mind the musical
instrument bearing his name. To his native Russia, though, Lev
Sergeyevich Termen was literally a character who spanned the history of the
Soviet Union, from the original Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of
the USSR. In the process, Termen managed to influence innumerable lives
both famous and obscure, influencing history without being a focus for
it.
Termen originally started life as mathematics prodigy and rapidly found
himself drawn into the fledgling field of electronics. While working on
early television systems, Termen came across the basic principle for
one of the first electronic musical instruments. The theremin (Termen
first gave it the name "etherophone") effectively produced music with
modulated static: theremins had no moving parts and no parts to be played
as in standard instruments. Instead, a theremin player used two
antennae, one for pitch and one for volume, and waved his or her hands in the
air near the antennae to produce musical tones. In the cases of skilled
musicians, the theremin could be used as an analog for any number of
existing instruments, but it also promised to be a wonderful opportunity
for nonmusicians to play a whole new instrument without any of the
preconceptions fostered by strings or valves.
Partly because Lenin himself was duly impressed by Termen's dedication
to the socialist cause, and partly because the theremin was a perfect
propaganda tool for showing the superiority of Soviet technology, Termen
left Russia to travel from Germany to England to the United States. The
official excuse for Termen's tour was to demonstrate the wonders of the
theremin, but he was also under strict orders to collect any and all
information on German and US technology and manufacturing and relay them
back to the USSR. While following both of these goals, Termen managed
to get a contract with RCA to mass-produce theremins for the home user
just as the 1929 stock market crash hit.
At this point, the parallels between the theremin and the
Internet-ready computer are glaringly obvious. Overenthusiastic reporters relayed
articles that misstated the theremin's abilities (one such newspaper
article made the theremin out as an automatic jukebox that could play any
number of songs with the wave of a hand in its general direction), and
the "ready-for-the-home" RCA theremins still required tuning from
individuals with basic electronics skills, leaving most buyers dissatisfied.
Due to ongoing financial difficulties, RCA stopped production. Termen
remained in the US on a much-updated work visa until 1938, when he
succumbed to homesickness and returned to Russia.
Until recently, most non-Russians only knew that Termen had disappeared
in the middle of the night, and grisly stories of his kidnapping by
Soviet agents were relayed for years. His invention, while not the
breakthrough success he had hoped for, retained its popularity for years, not
only influencing future electronic musicians and designers such as
Robert Moog (inventor of the Moog synthesizer), but helping to create such
diverse sounds as the unearthly soundtrack for the film "The Day The
Earth Stood Still" and the cheery whistle in the Beach Boys' single "Good
Vibrations." The true fate of the man, though, really only became
available under the glasnost reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev in the late
1980s.
Termen had the incredible bad luck to come back to Russia during the
Stalinist purges, where millions of people were summarily interrogated,
forced to implicate dozens of others, and either shipped to prison camps
or shot on the spot. Having spent years in America, he immediately
became a suspect of counterrevolutionary thoughts or actions, and was
shipped off to the prison camp/gold mine of Kolyma for an eight year
sentence. He probably would have died there had Stalin and his cronies not
decimated the Russian military and scientific communities, and Termen's
distinctive skills inadvertently became a major precipitate of the Cold
War.
During the Gary Powers U2 incident, the United States responded to
Khruschev's claims to the UN of unjustified US spying upon Russia with
their own little bomb: a secret bug in the American Embassy hidden in a
wooden copy of the Great Seal. The bug was a particular bit of Termen
genius: undetectable by standard X-rays, the bug was completely
nonfunctional until a directional microwave beam hit it, in which case it started
broadcasting radio transmissions to a waiting receiver. Without knowing
it, almost everything spoken in the Embassy was picked up by Russian
radios, until a British radio operator at the UK Embassy was surprised
with hearing the US ambassador speaking on an open frequency. While the
CIA couldn't ascertain the bug's function, the MI5 did, and for a short
time, the UK led the world in covert bug technology.
After this, Termen found work with a "mailbox": operations founded and
funded by the newly formed KGB that were so secretive that family
members and friends who accidentally discovered that he was still alive were
told in no uncertain terms that their continued good health and freedom
were due to their forgetting that they had ever seen Termen in the
first place. Even with these restrictions, Termen continued to work on
electronic musical instruments, although officially shunned by the staff of
the Moscow Academy of Arts and forgotten by most of the rest of the
world.
Because of these issues and more, author Albert Glinsky had to depend
upon multiple sources for most of Termen's story: considering the
Stalinist fondness for removing people from history entirely (in many cases
literally, where librarians would receive packages in the mail stating
that particular pages had to be removed from encyclopedias and books and
replaced with new pages that removed individuals committing real or
imaginary crimes against the state), the fact that a book of this
magnitude was possible at all says much about Glinsky's scholarship. In the
process, he also illuminates the days when radio and television were still
hobbies for a fascinated few, and shows the repercussions of Termen's
inventions over the last century. Termen himself never particularly
craved being the center of attention, but his work influenced the flow of
the twentieth century in innumerable and significant ways, and his death
in 1993 at age 96 was, to use an overworn cliche, really the end of an
era. Other inventors have influenced both technology and art since
those first theremin concerts of the 1920s, but not quite in the same way.
