to open next chapter. - NASA's History Office

School in the Twenties
Theremin emigrated to the United States from the USSR not against the
wishes of the government, but with its consent. With its assistance, from 1929
through 1938, he organized and headed a company in New York that produced
electronic musical instruments.The company thrived, and Theremin himself, while
remaining a Soviet citizen, became an American millionaire. In America he got
married, but in 1938 was called back to Moscow and immediately arrested.Taking
into consideration his contributions, a special conference sentenced him to eight
years in a labor camp. He was sent not to Kolyma, but to Central Design Bureau
Archives of Natalya Sergeyevna Korolev. Photo by N.A. Syromyatin.
B. Ye. Chertok enjoying a lesson on the thereminvox with its creator, L.S. Theremin, at the apartment
of N.S. Koroleva, Moscow, 1986.
29 (TsKB-29), a sharaga headed by “enemy of the people”Andrey Tupolev. 3 There
he was tasked with developing the guidance system for an unmanned radiocontrolled
aircraft. Convicted prisoner Sergey Korolev was a consultant on the
aircraft’s design.
In 1941, Theremin was evacuated to Omsk along with all of the workers at
TsKB-29. By then, however, the leaders from Lavrentiy Beriya’s department had
found a more urgent subject for Theremin’s talent: they transferred him to a sharaga
to develop equipment for secret communications, eavesdropping, encoding, and
voice recognition. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes the activity of this institution
3. TsKB-29—Tsentralnoye konstruktorskoye byuro 29. Kolyma was the location of the notorious GULAG
camp in eastern Siberia.
45