Pioneers among Pioneers: The Founders of Soviet Computer Technology

Between 1940 and 1970 Soviet computer technology developed rapidly. During this time the most famous Soviet computer science schools were founded by Sergei Alexeevich Lebedev, Victor Mikhailevich Glushkov, Isador Semenovich Brook, and Bashir Iskandarovich Rameev. But Lebedev was truly a unique individual. He possessed an extraordinary brilliance that reigned over the field of computer science from the time of the very first vacuum tube computers, performing mere thousands of operations per second were conceived, to the time of super high-speed computers based on semiconductors followed by computers based on integrated circuits were used every day. Fifteen high-production computers, the most complex machines of their time, were completed under his guidance. Each of them was a new step in computer technology, more reliable and more user-friendly.

From 1948–1951, at the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (ASU), Lebedev directed the design and development of the first stored program computer in continental Europe. Although Lebedev named this machine the Small Electronic Computer [in Russian: Malaya Elektronnaya Schetnaya Mashina, or MESM], it incorporated six thousand tubes and could hardly fit into the left wing of a two-story building of a former Orthodox monastery near Kiev, where it was assembled. There, in the Kiev suburb of Feofania, a branch of the Kiev psychiatric hospital used to operate before the Second World War. When the Nazis reached Feofania in 1941, they murdered all the patients and established a military hospital. The building was badly damaged during the liberation of Kiev. In 1948, it was given in this condition to the Academy of Sciences Institute of Electrical Engineering to be used as a laboratory. It was not easy to get to Feofania by bus, because the roads during the spring and autumn were practically impassable. In the summer, however, Feofania, enclosed by a grove of oak-trees, became a beautiful spot teeming with songbirds, rabbits, and an abundance of mushrooms and berries.

I met Sergei Alexeevich for the first time in autumn of 1950 at one of the conferences of the Electrical Engineering Institute council. There was nothing striking or unusual in his appearance or manner. He was short, thin and wore black-framed glasses that made his face look harsher than it actually was. His voice was loud, a bit hoarse, but even. He conducted the conference in a quiet and business-like manner, listening attentively to the speakers. His remarks were usually brief. If someone told a good joke, he laughed loudly and infectiously.

When a smile came over Sergei Alexeevich's typically serious face, it was like a burst of sunlight appearing in a dark room. His face would become kind, childlike, sweet and unguarded. Since Sergei Alexeevich rarely smiled, those who had never seen his smile had no idea about how much gentleness and humanity he possessed.^[1]

Sergei Alexeevich Lebedev was born November 2, 1902 in Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia, to a family of a teacher. His parents believed that a teacher must serve as a role model for his pupils as well as for the children of his own family. The main principles of Sergei Alexeevich's upbringing were honesty, integrity, impeccable work ethic, and intolerance for pettiness and subservient attitude. These early influences shaped the personalities of Sergei Alexeevich and the other Lebedev children.

In 1923, Lebedev entered the Baumann Technical Institute in Moscow. There, he immediately became absorbed in science. He majored in the field of high voltage technology and wrote his senior thesis on "The Stability of Parallel Work of Electric Power Stations." This was an important paper of great scientific and practical importance.

Having received his Diploma with a degree in Electrical Engineering in April, 1928, Lebedev simultaneously became a teacher at the Baumann Institute and a junior research worker at the V. I. Lenin State Electrical Engineering Institute (VEI). He quickly became a head of a research group at VEI and later ran the Laboratory of Electrical Power Networks. In 1933, together with A.S. Zhdanov, he published a monograph titled The Stability of Parallel Work of Electrical Systems, which in 1934 was revised and republished. A year later the State Higher Diploma Commission [in Russian: Vuishaya Attestatsionaya Kommissiya, or VAK] honored the young scientist with a professor's post. In 1939, Lebedev, not even a Candidate of Science yet, successfully defended his doctoral thesis.^[2] The premise for his study was his own theory of artificial stability of power systems.

Sergei Alexeevich worked in Moscow for almost twenty years, during the last ten of which he supervised VEI's automation department. Before the Great Patriotic War [Second World War], VEI had been one of the most famous scientific research institutions and many distinguished scientists had worked there. The automation department was working on power systems control, automatic control theory, new means of automation, and telemechanics. The institute was connected to a powerful industrial base that incorporated research results directly into practice.

Almost every project in the field of power engineering developed by the institute's scientists required elaborate computing facilities, either to make calculations for the work itself or to include them in the range of computing devices. Thus, calculations on the 9600 Megawatt, one thousand-kilometer-long electric power line – the Kiubyshev-Moscow hydroelectric project – demanded a highly automated set of powerful inductors and capacitors to simulate the mathematical model of the line. The simulations were done in one of the buildings on Nogin Square in Moscow. The second version of the model was made in Sverdlovsk. A specialized analog computing device used for these models permitted scientists to make the calculations very quickly and then set project assignments for specific electrical power lines.

During the Great Patriotic War, Lebedev developed a stabilization system for tank guns that was immediately adopted on the battlefield. Nobody knows how many tank crews were saved by this system, which allowed a tank gun to aim and fire while in motion. This feature made the Russian tank less vulnerable, and Lebedev was awarded the Order of Red Labor and a medal "For Valiant Labor During the Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945."

During the war it was necessary to develop analog computing elements to carry out basic arithmetic operations as well as differentiation and integration calculations for the tank gun stabilization system and the automatic guided missile system. In 1945, Lebedev created a simple analog computer to solve ordinary sets of differential equations found in power engineering problems. Lebedev also recognized the value of the binary system in computing. Lebedev's wife, Alisa Grigorievna, remembered the first months of the war, when during the dark Moscow evenings her husband sat in the bathroom and worked by the light of an oil lamp, scribbling the 1's and 0's of binary operations. Vsevolod Vianorovich Bardizh, Lebedev's deputy in the laboratory where the BESM (in Russian, Bistrodeistvuyshaya Electronnaya Shetnaya Mashina, or Big Electronic Calculating Machine) was created, is convinced that if not for the war, Lebedev would have developed a computer employing binary arithmetic much earlier; Sergei Alexeevich agreed with this assessment as well.

Professor Anatoly Vladimirovich Netushil, of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, confirms Lebedev's pre-war interest in digital computing:

The culmination of my research was my doctoral dissertation on "Analysis of Flip-Flop Elements of High-Speed Pulse Counters." It is well known that later, electronic flip-flop triggers became the basic elements in computer technology. From the very beginning of this thesis work in 1939, Lebedev had expressed a great interest and approval in my research. He agreed to act as an opponent of the dissertation, which I defended in 1945. At that time, nobody even suspected that Lebedev had been formulating ideas for the creation of digital computers, which made his name immortal.

The design documentation and materials concerning the MESM are still kept at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kiev. Many of the documents were written by Lebedev himself. Someone's caring hand marked them with – "To Keep Forever" – over forty years ago. Some of the excerpts are included here. In a short message sent to the Coordinating Council of the Academy of Science of the Soviet Union in early 1957, Lebedev wrote:

I began experimenting with high-speed electronic computers at the end of 1948. Between 1948 and 1949, I developed the basic principles of building similar computers. Considering the computer's great significance in our economic growth and the absence of experience in computer construction and operation in the Soviet Union, I decided to quickly create a small electronic computer, which would help investigate the basic principles of computer building, examine strategies for solving of associated problems, and gain experience in computer operation. We initially planned to create a working model of the machine and then develop it into a small electronic computer. To prevent delays, it was necessary to make a memory bank on flip-flop cells, which limited memory capacity. The development of the basic elements was completed in 1948. The general components of the machine and principal circuit diagrams for its units were finished at the end of 1949. By the end of 1950, the final adjustments on the working model were done and it was successfully presented before a commission.

Two months after the demonstration of the model, Lebedev made a report at a closed session of the Scientific Council at the Institute of Electrical and Heat Power Engineering. The minutes of the session were preserved in the archive of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Considering the great importance of this document in the history of computer technology, it is included here unabridged:

Top Secret Minutes of Session No. 1 of the closed Scientific Council of the ASU Institute of Electronic Technology and Heat-Power Engineering on January 8th, 1951. Present: Members of the Science Council: active members of the ASU I.T. Shvetz, S.A. Lebedev, member-correspondent Teitelbaum, Doctors of Technical Science A.D. Nesterenko, V.I. Tolubinsky, Candidates of Technical Science, E.V. Kruschova, A.N. Miliakh, A.I. Petrov. Invited: Chairman OTN Bureau, acting member of ASU, N.N. Dobrokhotov. Institute of Mathematics: Institute Director, active member of the ASU, A.U. Ishlinsky, Chief of Departments, I.B. Pogrebisky, Doctor of Technical Science, S.G. Krain. Institute of Electro-Technology: co-workers of the Simulation and Modifications Laboratory (Laboratory Chief S.A. Lebedev), Candidates of Science L.N. Dashevsky and E. A. Shkabara, Junior Assistant Scientific Co-worker Z. L. Rabinovich, Engineer S. B. Pogrebinsky, Co-worker of the Automation Laboratory, Candidate of Science, G.K. Nechaev. Agenda: 1. The Calculation-Solving Electronic Machine (Report of Director of the ASU Institute of Electro-Technology, ASU Acting Member, S.A. Lebedev). Heard: Report of ASU Acting Member S.A. Lebedev "The Calculation-Solving Electronic Machine." Principles of Operation of a high-performance machine are principles of arithmetic. The basic goal for this machine is the acceleration and automation of calculations. The laboratory was given the task of creating a working prototype of an electronic, high-performance computing machine. In the development of the prototype, we accepted certain limitations. The speed of computing was equal to 100 operations per second. The number of bits was limited to five in the decimal system (16 bits in the binary system). The machine can add, subtract, multiply, divide and execute other operations, such as compare, shift, and stop, allowing for the possibility of adding other functions. The basic element of the electronic counting machine is the one that allows for summation. Electronic relays are used (trigger cells), in which the current is switched from one electronic tube to another by means of a pulse-feed on a grid. This permits summing, from which all other operations are formed. Instead of a decimal system, a binary system is used, which is defined by the characteristics of the trigger cells (S.A. Lebedev uses a flow-chart to clarify how the machine works). In addition to the computing elements, the machine must have other elements that govern the calculation process, such as enabling devices and memory elements. In 1951 the laboratory was given the task to turn the prototype into a working machine. Up until now, the obstacle has been the absence of automatic devices of data input and automatic output of received results. The automation of these operations will be realized with the help of magnetic tape, which has been developed by the Institute of Physics (in the laboratory of ASU member correspondent A.A. Kharkevich). Questions presented: N.N. Dobrokhotov: What other computing machines will be developed in the USSR, and if they are being developed, on what principle? A.I. Petrov: What is the field of application of the machine? A.U. Ishlinsky: 1) What is the operating life of machine elements? 2) What is the reliability of the machine, in case of element failure? 3) How did you manage to use foreign technical materials? 4) What are the qualifications of the operators? G.K. Nechaev: What is the correlation between calculation time and output (input) of the task in the automatic work of the machine? I.T. Shvetz: 1) What is the state of development of electronic counting machines at other institutes? 2) What about the situation abroad and what are their parameters compared to ours? 3) Who developed the trigger cells, how long ago, and where else are they being used? 4) How do the ASU Institute of Mathematics, ASU Institute of Physics and the ASUSSR [Academy of Sciences of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics] Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology participate in this complex? L.I. Tsukernik: What original solutions have been incorporated in the machine by the ASU Institute of Electro-Technology? S.G. Krain: What tasks will the developed and automated machine be able to perform? S.A. Lebedev: I am going to group similar questions together. I have data on 18 machines developed by the Americans. This data has the character of an advertisement, without any kind of information on how the machines are built. As to the question of constructing computing machines, we must catch up with the developments abroad and must do so quickly. In the available foreign literature, the project design and construction of a machine takes five to ten years, but we want to complete construction in two years. Parameters of the American machines are as follows: multiplication time on the ENIAC is 5.5 milliseconds, on the EDVAC- 4 milliseconds, and on our machine 8-9 milliseconds. Beside the Academy of Sciences Institute of Electro-Technology, work on developing such machines is going on at: a) the SKB-245 Ministry of Machine and Instrument Construction; where they started developing a machine using mechanical relays, but have now switched to using electronics; b) the ASU Energy Institute, where they use trigger cells; c) the AS-USSR Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology, in conjunction with our work.[3] This machine is quite like the MESM, but has been intended for high-performance, more so than the existing American machines. The operation time on this machine will be equal to 0.2 milliseconds.[4] The principal addition to our machine is the new summing element, plus the resolution of the issues of integrating separate machine elements. The machine's basic construction principle was using only proven, well-known elements, and this is also true of the trigger circuitry. There are numerous applications for the machine. In theory, all problems that can be simplified into a numerical format can be solved with this machine. It can also solve differential equations and produce calculation tables. Another benefit of these machines is the ability to perform the same calculations with varying input data (e.g. calculation of guided missile trajectories). The appearance of electronic calculating machines also allows applying new mathematical methods to solve statistical physics problems. Taking advantage of experience from abroad is difficult, since published material is so scarce. We need three types of employees to work on the machine: mathematicians (for program coding); operators (for trouble-shooting the machine); and those able to do both jobs. The real-time data input and results/output time of the machine are equal to the operation cycle time. The Academy of Sciences Institute of Mathematics participates in the joint development of programming problems, while the ASU Institute of Physics participates in the development of magnetic recording. The increase in machine reliability will be realized with preliminary tube testing. Failure of any of the machine elements can be easily detected. Presenters: A.U. Ishlinsky: Creation of a prototype is one of the most impressive achievements of the Department of Technological Science and of S.A. Lebedev's. There is no need to discuss the significance of the machine. The presence of the electronic machine removes much of the difficulty and will help bypass application of those calculation methods currently being employed. It's clear that such machines will be widely used in defense industry as well as in science. The design of such a machine is a great achievement in science. In the future, the machine will not have to be loaded with the same type of calculations meant for applied purposes. On the contrary, with its help, scientific research work will be carried out. N.N. Dobrokhotov: The importance of conducting research on the calculation machine is quite evident. The task of the ASU is to design a machine better than those existing abroad. In order to ensure that, it is necessary to organize an exchange of opinions, as well as discussions about the crucial points of the machine design. It is imperative to discuss the work on a nation-wide scale. S.E. Teitelbaum: It is necessary to considerably extend the staff and the material base to speed up of such important work. S.G. Krain: The utilization of an electronic machine will allow us to apply a number of new technological methods. To facilitate this, we must intensify and maximize our research efforts. I.T. Shvetz: Lebedev's report, now presented, brings about a feeling of satisfaction and pride in our Academy of Science. The work on electronic computing machines is related to some of the most important work of the ASU. It is necessary to assist the development of such work and to accelerate the machine's performance to the highest degree. These are the shortcomings: 1) S.A. Lebedev does not advocate making this work priority for the ASU. 2) There is not enough interaction between different institutes and we need to ensure closer cooperation between the ASU Institutes of Mathematics and Physics. 3) We should not use the term "logic operation" with respect to the machine because the machine cannot make logic operations. We'd better substitute this term for another. Of course I believe that the scope of work should be increased, but this is not the most important work at the ASU. One also needs to keep in mind that the financial allotment to the ASU in 1951 will decrease. We should consider in detail what we need to ask for from the Presidium of the ASU for the quickest fulfillment of the work. S.A. Lebedev: I must stress the high importance of work on computing machines. Let's take the following example: the only effective method to intercept a long-range rocket is to send an anti-missile rocket. To accomplish this, we need to determine the possible point of interception. The application of a calculation machine will allow us to compute the rocket trajectory and ensure a precise hit. In accordance with the governmental order, the design for the machine project will be finished in the first quarter of 1951. This schematic project will be submitted to a panel of experts for a comprehensive evaluation. I agree that we should encourage closer cooperation with the ASU Institute of Mathematics and Physics. We have connections with the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology not only in the financial area (though that is important because it provides for the possibility of creating a prototype) but also in the scientific field. With respect to the use of this computer, MESM, for calculations, it will be difficult to refuse those who need it; we are compelled to do this because MESM is the only working computer in the USSR at this time. Resolved: 1) To note that the work of the ASU Institute of Technology—under supervision of ASU member S.A. Lebedev—on an electronic computing machine are quite up-to-date and are of great scientific and practical importance to the USSR's defense, as well as scientific research work in many disciplines. 2) To recommend to S.A. Lebedev that he apply to the ASU Presidium, requesting funding for further development of Soviet computing machines, to considerably accelerate the work and extend the experimental base in Feofania, to prepare necessary staff, and to assure the necessary participation of other ASU Institutes in this work. 3) Considering the complex character of the work carried out by the ASU Institute of Electro-Technology jointly with the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology, and ASU Institutes of Mathematics and Physics, it would be expedient to lay out a plan for the most efficient collaborative research and design work based on the complex participation of the Ukrainian and Soviet scientific institutions, along with the Ministry of Device Manufacturing and Machine Building of the USSR. Chairman of the Scientific Council, Active-Member of ASU I.T. Shvetz Scientific Secretary—E. V. Krushchova

There is another very important document, written by Lebedev in his daily notes, that will enable us to present the chronology and stages of the design of the first Soviet computer—the MESM.

Secret Draft The Stages of Development of the First Electronic (Small) Calculating Machine
1. October-December 1948	Development of the general construction principles for an electronic calculating machine.
2. January–March 1949	The general guidelines are set for the development of separate elements. Seminars on computing machines with the representatives of the ASU Institutes of Mathematics and Physics.
3. March–April 1949	Development of triggers on the 6N9M and 6N15 vacuum tubes. Development of logic units. Development of pulse generators. Development of counters on 6N15 vacuum tubes.
4. May–June 1949	Development of arithmetic units in 6N15 tubes (1st version). Transfer to the new location and set up of the laboratory.
5. July–September 1949	Development of arithmetic units for 6N9 tubes (2nd version). Development of static memory elements. Development of the electronic switchboard.
6. October–December 1949	Creation of the main blueprints for the machine prototype. Development of general machine design. Construction and preparation of the machine's frame.
7. January–March 1950	Development and preparation of separate units and their debugging. Development and preparation of the machine's control panel.
8. April–July 1950	Development of technical requirements for magnetic memory. Installation of the machine units in its frame and assembly of inter-unit connections. Assembly of connections between frame and control panel. Repairing the interface between frame units and group units. Work on magnetic memory in ASU Institute of Physics. Establishing a branch of the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology in Kiev.
9. August–November 1950	Debugging the computer from the control panel. First start-up test of the machine prototype (Nov 6, 1950).
10. November–December 1950	Increase the quantity of memory blocks to enlarge the memory unit capacity. Refining operations: addition and subtraction. Refining operations: multiplication and comparison.
11. January–February 1951	Demonstration (January 4, 1951) of the operating prototype to the State Commission. Drafting of the act for the completion of work on the prototype. During the demonstration of the prototype, resolved a problem of computing the sums of a series of odd-numbered factorials raised to a degree. Begin the conversion of the prototype to a working computer (MESM).
12. March–May 1951	Development of a system of constants and commands. Introduction of the photographic recording of results. Development of magnetic memory control systems. Launching the system of constants and commands. Presentation of the operating computer to the government commission and the commission of experts.
13. June–August 1951	Adaptation of the device for separating punched cards for initial data input. Integration of new units for implementation of summing operation commands, input of sub-programs, and connections with the magnetic recording of code. Assembly and debugging of magnetic memory control systems. Issuing of the government resolution (No. 2759–1321 from July 1, 1951), mandating the Electronic (MESM) computer to come on line by the fourth quarter of 1951.
14. August–November 1951	Refinement of division and other operations. Alteration of memory units to increase reliability. Completing alteration on the small machine prototype and general testing before start-up.
15. December 1951	Start-up of the Small Electronic Machine (MESM) (December 25, 1951). Solution of a real problem on the machine: computing a probability distribution function. 585 values of "p" were calculated to five places, for which nearly 250,000 operations were made. Calculations were conducted in 2.5 hours and used to establish a computation table. Based on that table, values for defining and increasing the accuracy of artillery weapons were determined.
16. January 1952	Report by acting ASU member, S.A. Lebedev (January 4, 1952) at the AS-USSR Presidium on ratifying the motion to place the Small Electronic Counting Machine (MESM) into service. Report by acting ASU member S.A. Lebedev (January 11, 1952) at the ASU Presidium on placing MESM into service.
January 12, 1952	Fulfillment of orders for calculations on MESM. Computation of the function: 2100 values for x were found, which required more than a million operations.
January 25, 1952	Calculation of the function: 850 values for x were calculated and one million operations were required. Debugging and placing into operation the magnetic memory system. Completion of calculations on the stability of the Kiubyshev-Moscow High-Power Electro-Transmission System.
18. June–September 1952	Increase the number of computer digits from 16 to 20 to improve the precision of calculations to 6 decimal places.
19. October–November 1952	Solved the harmonization problem of the synchronous power generators at the Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Station per by the Main Volga Hydroelectric Plant request. Similar calculations were programmed at the request of other state organizations for important projects of communism.
Principal Constructor of the Electronic Calculating Machine Acting ASU member, S.A. Lebedev.

^[1] Lev N. Dashevsky, and Ekaterina A. Shkabara, Kak eto nachinalos'(Moskva: Znanie, 1981), passim.

^[2] Editor's and Translator's note: VAK was the highest scientific certifying body in the Soviet Union. After defending either a Candidate of Science thesis or a Doctor of Science thesis at a special scientific council attached to an educational institution, one then had to send the thesis to VAK in Moscow. Only after VAK approval could one then receive a scientific certification such as the title of Professor. In the Soviet Union, there were three levels of scientific accomplishment. The first, Specialist, required one to graduate after 5–6 years at a university and defend one's diploma work. The second, Candidate of Science, required 2 or 3 years study as a post-graduate, followed by successful defense of one's Candidate's Thesis before a special scientific council, and finally, an obligatory approval by VAK. This is often considered equivalent to a Ph.D. or Doctoral level in the west. The third level was the Doctoral Degree. To become a Doctor of Science, one usually had to firmly establish a new scientific direction or school. This required at least three years and a successful Doctoral thesis defense, followed by VAK approval.

^[3] Translator's note: In Russian, Institut Tochnoi Mekhaniki i Vyichislite'lnoi Tekhniki, or ITMVT.

^[4] Author's Note: This was Lebedev's reference to the BESM, his future computer.

Kiev-the Birthplace of the MESM

The MESM was initially planned by Lebedev to serve as a model for the BESM. At first, MESM was even considered the model electronic computing machine. But, in the process of its creation, it became obvious that in comparison it was already a small computer. Because of it, input-output units were added, along with increased memory capacity on a magnetic drum, and the word "model" was changed to "small."

Given Kiev's war-torn condition, the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine was faced with the challenge of where to allow the construction of the machine.

But the most difficult part of the whole project was the actual construction of MESM. I believe that it was simply Sergei Alexeevich's comprehensive experience from previous research that allowed him to cope so brilliantly with the technical aspects of computer building principles. Yet, one crucial miscalculation was made. The MESM had been placed on the ground floor of the two-story building where the Academy of Sciences allowed Lebedev to locate the laboratory. When the unit was assembled and the power turned on, its six thousand vacuum tubes turned the premises into a sauna. Workers had to remove parts of the ceiling in order to deflect some of the heat from the room.

Led by Lebedev and his main assistants, Candidates of Science Lev Naumovich Dashevsky and Ekaterina Alexeevna Shkabara, together with a team of twenty five engineers, technicians and assembly workers, all took an active part in designing, assembling, adjusting and operating the MESM.

Dashevsky and Shkabara later recalled how Lebedev interacted with the team at every stage of the project. When the machine found an error in the computations of two very distinguished mathematicians, he personally offered to check their hand calculations to 9 places, locking himself away for an entire day of painstaking work. He reappeared the following day, with his glasses askew (a sign of success) and a rare smile on his face, saying: "Don't torment the machine. It's correct. It's the people who are wrong." He had found a mistake, duplicated in the hand calculations.

At the end of 1951, an impressive group of scientists from the USSR Academy of Sciences came to Feofania from Moscow to commission the MESM for operation. ^[5] The group was headed by Academician Mstislav V. Keldysh. In the group were the academicians Sergei L. Sobolev, Mikhail A. Lavrentiev, and Professors K.A. Semendayev and A.G. Kurosh.

When the word got out that there was an operating computer in the Ukraine, a steady parade of scientists from Kiev and Moscow headed to Feofania with scientific and defense-related problems that could not be solved without the aid of a computer. MESM began to work around the clock to help solve the most important problems of that period.

On January 4, 1952, Lebedev presented his report on MESM to the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Later that year, after Lebedev had moved to Moscow, the Institute of Electrical Engineering of the Academy of Science of Ukraine nominated the MESM project for the Soviet Union's State Prize. Lebedev, Dashevsky and Shkabara were listed as the leaders of the MESM team, and they undoubtedly deserved the prize: a large portion of the computing principles developed by Lebedev are still employed in modern computer technology. In 1950, when the model of MESM had been tested, the only other similar working machines were Frederick Williams and Tom Kilburn's Baby and Maurice Wilkes' EDSAC in England.

However, each British computer employed a sequential operational arithmetic unit, while MESM worked on parallel arithmetic units.

The Committee on State Prizes had to recognize that in 1952 MESM was practically the only computer in the country that was solving the most important scientific and technological problems from the fields of thermonuclear weapons processes (such as Yakov B. Zeldovich's work), space flights and rocket technology, long-distance electric transmission lines, mechanics, statistical quality control, and others. The following document is one of many that testifies to the importance and originality of the MESM:

TOP SECRET The Academy of Sciences of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Department of Applied Mathematics The V.A. Steklov Mathematics Institute November 26, 1953, N 438 To the Director of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Institute of Electric Power Engineering, Member-correspondent of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukraine S.S.R., A.D. Nesterenko: The Board of Directors of the Department of Applied Mathematics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, V.A. Steklov Mathematics Institute expresses many thanks to the Ukraine SSR Academy of Sciences, Institute of Electric Power Engineering for its participation in the great and important computer-calculation work carried out from November 1952 through July 1953 on a small electronic computer (MESM) designed by academician S.A. Lebedev. During this period the scientific group of the USSR Academy of Sciences Mathematics Institute under the direction of academician A.A. Dorodnitsyn and Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, A.A. Lyapunov, in collaboration with the scientific team of Laboratory No. 1 of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Institute of Electric Power Engineering (supervised by academician S.A. Lebedev) performed time consuming and painstaking calculations for three complex programs, carrying out nearly 50 million operations on the computer. We would also like to highlight the meticulous and conscientious work of the following scientists: Deputy of Laboratory Director, L.N. Dashevsky, Chief Engineer, R.Y. Cherniak; Engineers A.L. Gladish, E.E. Dedeshko, I.P. Okulova, T.I. Petsukh and S.B. Pogrebinsky and Technicians U.S. Mozipa, S.B. Rosenzweig and A.G. Semenovsky. These co-workers selflessly dedicated countless hours and expanded monumental effort to guarantee a high-quality trouble-free operation of the machine. Director of the Department of Applied Mathematics of the USSR Academy of Sciences Mathematics Institute, Academician M.V. Keldysh.

But Lebedev and his team failed to receive the State Prize. This was the first, but not the last time when the importance of the Lebedev's contribution in the formation and development of computer technology was not properly appreciated.

Unfortunately, the Board of Directors of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences, which at the time was headed by a biologist, did not understand or perhaps did not even attempt to understand the significance of Lebedev's work. The Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Ivan Dmitrievich Nazarenko, who visited Lebedev's laboratory in the end of 1950, failed to properly endorse Lebedev's work either. After familiarizing himself with the capabilities of the MESM and the prospects for the advancement and application of computer technology, he expressed his surprise and delight in one word: "Sorcery!" Leaving the laboratory, Nazarenko told Lebedev that he would expect proposals for further development of the project.

Having heard over the course of a week about Lebedev's project, the Presidium of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences sent a letter to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party asking for only modest support to continue computer research. This lack of action, along with the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and the Ukrainian government's failure to comprehend and properly evaluate the significance of computer technology, continued for the next ten years, until the appearance of Victor Glushkov. A quote taken from a letter sent to the Central Committee of Ukrainian Communist Party in 1956 by Lebedev's former laboratory co-workers confirmed this state of affairs: "The position that our Republic has taken regarding computer technology is equivalent to a crime against the State." The author of this book was among those who signed this letter. Ukraine's chance to assume a leading role in the most important field of science and technology of the twentieth century was lost.

Mikhail Alexeevich Lavrentiev, a vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Science and Director of the Mathematics Institute at the time, understood the significance of Lebedev's work and his own complicated position. He wrote to Stalin about the need to accelerate research in the field of computer technology and the great prospects for computer usage, including national security purposes. The result was quite unexpected for the mathematician Lavrentiev: in 1951 he was appointed as the director of the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology in Moscow, which by the summer of 1948 had already been selected by the government to develop modern computing technology.

Lavrentiev decided to capitalize on Lebedev's experience. Lebedev had already demonstrated his creative possibilities, conceiving and drafting provisional schemata and diagrams for the BESM. In March of 1951, Lavrentiev established Laboratory No. 1 at the Institute for Precision Mechanics and asked Lebedev to head it. Thus BESM, although initially planned as a prototype in Kiev, was constructed in Moscow.

Lebedev dedicated a short article, "At the Cradle of the First Computer," to Lavrentiev on his 70th birthday, praising him for his role in the creation of both the MESM and BESM.

Lebedev wrote:

During the early postwar years I worked in Kiev. I had recently been selected as an academician of the Academy of Science of Ukraine, when the laboratory was created in the Kiev suburb of Feofania where the first Soviet computer would be born. That was a difficult time. The country had to rebuild a war-devastated economy. Every small issue became a big problem. The first Soviet computer may not have appeared in Feofania if not for the kind patronage of M.A. Lavrentiev, who at the time was Vice-President of the Ukrainian Academy of Science. Even now, I never cease to be amazed and delighted by that inexhaustible energy with which Lavrentiev defended and promoted his ideas. In my opinion, it would be difficult to find a person who, after meeting Lavrentiev, would not have been infected by his enthusiasm. Mikhail Alexeevich was appointed to be the Director of the ASUSSR Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology. I was also transferred to Moscow and we began our collaboration to create the big digital electronic computers. When the machine –BESM – was ready, it was in no way inferior to the latest American models and appeared to be a genuine triumph of the ideas of its creators.

After MESM was completed, Zinovy Lvovich Rabinovich began leading the design work for a specialized computer, the Specialized Electronic Calculating Machine [in Russian: Spetsialnaya Elektronnaya Shetnaya Mashina, or SESM], for solving sets of algebraic equations. Lebedev's ideas were the basic principles for the construction of this machine. The SESM was Lebedev's last project in Ukraine, but both it and MESM paved the way for many task-specific specialized computers. After Lebedev transferred to Moscow, his students Dashevsky, Shkabara, Pogrebinsky, and others who stayed behind in Ukraine, began developing a new computer, the Kiev. Even though the Kiev's operational features were inferior to Lebedev's new M-20 computer, it was still state-of-the-art at that time.

In 1958 Viktor Glushkov became head of Lebedev's former laboratory and the Kiev was completed under his supervision. Later, the machine was employed for a long time at the Academy of Sciences Computing Center, where a computer laboratory had been established. The Computing Center was eventually reorganized as the Cybernetics Institute; it is now renamed after its founder, Glushkov.

Speaking at the Academy of Sciences Scientific Council of the Cybernetics Institute on the twenty-fifth anniversary of MESM's creation, Glushkov acknowledged the significance of the MESM in the development of computer technology in Ukraine and throughout the Soviet Union:

Independent of foreign scientists, S.A. Lebedev developed the principles for building a stored memory program computer.^[6] Under his supervision the first computer in Europe was created. It was capable of solving the most important scientific and technical problems, which led to the foundation of the Soviet programming school.

Lebedev's service to Ukrainian science has been well commemorated. A street in Kiev has been named after him, and the Academy of Sciences has set up a contest in his honor. The first winners of the Lebedev Prize in Computer Science were Mikhail A. Lavrentiev, Vladimir Andreevich Melnikov, Zinovy Rabinovich, and the author of this book. In Kiev, at the entrance of the Electrical Power Engineering Institute building where Lebedev was a director, a memorial plaque has been placed in his honor. Speaking at the dedication of the memorial, President of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, academician Boris E. Paton remarked:

We will always be proud of the fact that it was at Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, in our dear Kiev, where Lebedev—a distinguished scientist in the fields of computer technology, mathematics and large automated systems, first thrived. He pioneered the creation of the outstanding school of Computer Science in Kiev; his torch was later taken up by V.M. Glushkov. Today, we have the Glushkov Cybernetics Institute, one of the foremost and largest computer institutes in the world.

Lebedev lived and worked during a period of the vigorous development of such branches of science as electronics, computer technology, missiles, and the mastery of outer space and atomic energy. Patriotically, Sergei Alexeevich took a part in the largest projects with I.V. Kurchatov, S.P. Korolev and mathematician M.V. Keldysh, guaranteeing the creation of a shield for the Motherland.^[7] The role of the electronic computers created by Sergei Alexeevich in carrying out these projects was, without exaggeration, of enormous importance. His name stands tall in the ranks of the great scientists of the world.

^[5] Author's Note: Feofania was the site of the famous St. Panteleimon "The Healer" Monastery.

^[6] Author's Note: The American scientist John von Neumann's 1946 publications on computer building principles did not appear in the open press of the Soviet Union until the 1950s.

^[7] Editor's Note: Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov was scientific director of the Soviet atomic bomb project, while his contemporary Sergei P. Korolev was scientific head of the Soviet Space Program. In the Cold War, "The shield of the Motherland" was a commonly used expression for the anti-rocket and anti-aircraft defense systems that protected the Soviet Union.

Creative Rivalry

The first blocks in the scientific foundation of digital electronic technology were laid in Moscow, but things changed by the end of the 1940s. Because of Lebedev, the center of the new science shifted to Kiev. When academician Nikolai G. Bruevich was appointed as acting director of the Institute for Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology in Moscow on July 16, 1948, he did not know that secret work on the MESM was going on full speed in Kiev. In 1949, the first news about modern digital computers arrived at the Institute for Precision Mechanics from abroad. Foreign journals reported that in 1946, the first computer in the world, ENIAC [the Electronic Numeric Integrator and Calculator], had been created in America. It employed 18,000 vacuum tubes and performed about one thousand operations per second. Later, news of faster computers with fewer vacuum tubes appeared in the Soviet Union. Because the reports were very sketchy, the principles of building a machine remained unclear.

A year after the Institute for Precision Mechanics was established, a commission from the Soviet Academy of Sciences Presidium headed by Keldysh assessed the institute's work. Quite possibly, Lavrentiev's letter to Stalin prompted this investigation. Keldysh's commission came to a disturbing conclusion: digital electronic computer technology was developing rapidly in the West, whereas in the Soviet Union, it received very little attention. Spurred on by the commission's conclusion, Bruevich approved a decision to organize a department of high-speed computers in the institute through the bureau of Soviet Academy of Sciences Department of Technical Sciences. In September 1949, he charged a group of six scientists from his department to develop the necessary components for the creation of a digital computer.

A participant in the project, Petr Petrovich Golovistikov recalled:

Many visitors came to watch when we began to assemble the basic parts of the computer such as flip-flop triggers, a computer serial adder, rectifiers, and a decoder. At the time, I did not understand why Bruevich had invited them. It seemed to me that we had very little to show. Among the visitors were people such as the Minister of Machine Building and Instrument Engineering of the USSR Parshin, ministry board member Loskutov, and academician Blagonravov. This excited and compelled me to work every day from the wee hours in the morning until late at night. At last, I got used to these visits. I especially remembered one visit that took place in January of 1950. Bruevich brought in two men. One was tall, stately, and well-mannered; he listened attentively to the explanations. The other was short, wore glasses, and left a strong impression on me. He spoke directly to me and asked many questions. He wanted me to show him the computer's signals at various points and to demonstrate signal delay times in different circuits. He asked to change the generator frequency in order to define the range of scheme operation. He criticized many things and advised us to do some things in differently. To top it off, he asked me to make a prototype of a long circuit of controlled rectifiers. He wanted each tube to carry an additional load corresponding to similar tubes, so that the signal in the circuit would not dampen and so that the circuit would have minimal delay. Thus, I made the acquaintance of Lavrentiev and Lebedev. By this time, I knew that developments in the field of computers had begun at the ASUSSR Power Institute under I.S. Brook's supervision and at the Ministry of Machine Building and Instrument Engineering where SKB-245 [in Russian, Spetsial'noe konstruktorskoe byuro] was created. But completely unexpected for me was the fact that the first computer in the Soviet Union was developing rapidly under Sergei Alexeevich's supervision in Kiev.^[8]

Bruevich worked with the Soviet Ministry of Machine Building to establish by 1949 three organizations that composed a powerful scientific production collective: the Scientific Research Institute for Calculating Machine Construction [in Russian, Nauchno-Issledovat'elskii Institut Schetnovo Mashinostroyeniya – NII Shetomash], SKB-245, and the Calculating Machine Factory [in Russian, Zavod Schetno-Analiticheskhik Mashin, or SAM]. The director of the both the Schetmash and the SKB-245 was Mikhail Avksentievich Lesechko.

Despite the fact that these three organizations were ordered by the government to build differential analyzers similar to the ones the Americans had built in the 1930s and 1940s, Lesechko, relying on his engineering intuition, agreed with Bruevich's proposal to design and build vacuum tube based electronic computers.^[9] Yet a visit to the Institute for Precision Mechanics changed his mind. Lev Israelevich Gutenmakher, director of one of the Institute's laboratories, was attempting to build an electronic computer based not on vacuum tubes, but on electromagnetic non-contact relays [magnetic amplifiers]. His work appealed to of the Minister of Machine Building and Instrument Engineering, Petr Ivanovich Parshin, who took a keen interest in it.

When a change in leadership occurred at the Institute for Precision Mechanics in mid-March of 1950, the newly appointed director, Mikhail A. Lavrentiev, found himself under pressure on many fronts. First, there were very few specialists in the field of digital computer technology at the Institute. Second, the few relevant scientific departments that did exist were scattered throughout Moscow. Third, it appeared that the government was about to adopt a resolution mandating that the Institute develop a new digital electronic computer – a gigantic construction project consisting of thousands of vacuum tubes and significantly more complex than what Lavrentiev had seen in Kiev at Lebedev's laboratory. Thus, in an order dated March 20, 1950, Lavrentiev appointed Lebedev as Director of Laboratory No.1 of the Institute: Lebedev was now employed in both Kiev and Moscow. Also by this time, the Ministry of Machine Building and Instrument Engineering was commissioned to design and develop the other digital electronic computer based on Gutenmakher's ideas.

Before approving the governmental decree to develop and build two computers, Stalin required that several individuals be assigned to oversee each machine. Lavrentiev and chief designer of the BESM, Lebedev, were appointed from the Soviet Academy of Sciences. From the Ministry of Machine Building and Instrument Engineering, Lesechko and Yuri Yakovlevich Bazilevsky, chief designer of the Strela (Arrow) computer were appointed. Thus, Lebedev's powerful rival collective of the SKB-245, the SAM, and the SRI Schetmash was born. Clearly, the center of activity of the Soviet Union's digital electronic computing had shifted from Kiev to Moscow. For anyone else but Lebedev, the situation at the Academic Institute for Precision Mechanics would have seemed hopelessly complicated. Instead, he brought from Kiev his already sketched out plans for the BESM.

According to Golovistikov:

There is a legend that the BESM's full schemata was drafted on separate sheets of paper and kept by Lebedev on Kazbek cigarette boxes. This is simply not true. He had many thick notebooks that contained scrupulously drawn diagrams and designs, with all of the structural schemata of the machine, provisional diagrams of the units' operations, and detailed descriptions of all methods of individual operations. Having arrived from Kiev, he immediately began transferring this enormous volume of information to us...

Initially, I wasn't confident about the work I was performing. Lebedev assigned me to design the arithmetic unit, but also wanted me to understand the principles of other operational units. Kiril S. Neslukhovsky was commissioned to develop the control unit and needed to know how the machine as a whole would operate. Neslukhovsky became Sergei Alexeevich's technical operations manager. Later, this post was filled by Bardizh.

To find appropriate personnel for the Institute, Lavrentiev and Lebedev went to colleges to hand-pick students with practical experience. They were placed on staff and immediately received specific design assignments, while the development of all main computer units for the preliminary prototype was overseen by specialists. Students also took part in preparing project outlines relating to their own area of specialization. With only small modifications, according to the requirements of their colleges, these materials satisfied their graduation requirements.

By the end of 1950 the prep work on the prototypes of BESM's individual components was in full swing. In spring 1951, the staff of Laboratory No. 1 had grown to about fifty people – many were the most highly skilled specialists lured away from the Moscow Power Institute. Candidate of Technical Sciences O.K. Guschin (an assembly worker at that time) recalled the formation of the young team at the Institute under Lebedev's supervision:

It seems to me that everyone was proud of their participation in this great and important affair – the creation of Soviet computer technology, a gigantic device in its infancy, the so-called "electronic miracle" with hundreds of thousands of components. It should not be forgotten that the most complex radio-electronic device of that day was the KVN-49, the first Soviet television set.

Our work went on day and night, and nobody expected to have any time off. We built the prototype elements and components of the BESM. We made chasses and stands; we drilled and riveted, assembled and adjusted different versions of flip-flop triggers, counters and computing units, and then checked their reliability in operation. At every stage of the work, Sergei Alexeevich demonstrated an exemplary selflessness. After an intense workday, he often sat up until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., by the control desk or oscillograph, actively taking part in the fine adjustments of the machine.

Lebedev's competitor, Gutenmakher, encouraged by the support of the Ministry of Machine Building, was also working very hard. In 1950, he came up with an additional schematic for an electronic computing device for the SKB-245 based on ferrite-diode elements. At this time the situation in the Ministry changed drastically: Bashir Rameev appeared at SKB-245 project, having been collaborating with Isaak Brook until 1948 on programming controls for electronic computers.

Rameev immediately got to work and prepared an advanced electronic computer project based on vacuum tubes. Subsequent events unfolded very strangely. In Rameev's absence, the technical council of SKB-245 considered Gutenmakher's project. Then, in Gutenmakher's absence, they listened to Rameev. In the end, the decision was made to support the machine based on vacuum tubes, instead of Gutenmakher's design. Thus the BESM had a serious competitor—the Strela. The SKB-245's managers appointed Rameev as the deputy director for Yuli Bazilevsky, the chief designer of the project. Rameev was only 32 years old at the time, but he already carried heavy personal burdens. Being the son of the "enemy of the people," he was expelled from the institute during his second year and ended up serving in the army; he was also a highly driven person and had an insatiable desire to work.

Thus Lebedev now faced a competitive-triumvirate: Lesechko, Bazilevsky and Rameev; while the Institute for Precision Mechanics faced a powerful competitor – SKB-245 together with the SAM and the Schetmash. The center of gravity of digital computing technology work had been relocated from Kiev to Moscow.

Having lost the support of SKB-245, Gutenmakher continued to work on his project by himself. In his laboratory at the Institute for Precision Mechanics, a machine based on ferrite-diode elements had already been designed and was being built at the same time as the BESM. I became acquainted with it sometime in 1954, when it was already operating. Its productivity was very poor. Due to the low quality of the elements it was also unreliable; the impulse power source was cumbersome and uneconomical. Under the pretext of secrecy, entrance to the laboratory was prohibited, and early in the 1960s it was completely closed. The strict secrecy in which Gutenmakher conducted his research ensured that very little was known about his machine. Nevertheless, it was a defining milestone in the history of computer technology.

On April 21, 1951, a State Commission assembled to review the two projects, BESM and Strela. The commission included such people as Keldysh, the Chairman, Minister of Machine Building and Instrument Engineering Parshin, academician Anatoly Arkadyevich Blagonravov, and others. Earlier, members of the commission visited Kiev where Lebedev demonstrated the MESM. A detailed analysis of the BESM and Strela projects had already been made in Moscow by the time the commission began evaluating these projects. Commission member Anatoly Alexeevich Dorodnitsyn remembered a curious argument that occurred during one of the sessions:

Strela's chief designer, Bazilevsky, declared that his machine, performing at 2,000 operations per second, could solve all the mathematical problems in the Soviet Union within four months. Therefore, the BESM with its higher performance of 8,000 -10,000 operations per second was unnecessary! Sergei Alexeevich parried the argument saying that due to its low capacity, Strela would not be able to work out a problem during the time between two errors and would display incorrect results, whereas BESM would succeed.

Both Bazilevsky and Lebedev successfully defended their proposals. The management of the Institute for Precision Mechanics decided to support the creation of an experimental model of the BESM. Sergei Alexeevich, in light of his experience creating and operating the MESM, recommend a modular design for the BESM – a bold move because many machines at that time were made with non-modular units. Luckily, the number of different modular blocks needed turned out to be small.

Lebedev and his team began the design and fabrication of racks, circuit boards, and machine units, but could not finish the project as planned. If this project had been completed successfully – all that it needed was a supply of industrial cathode ray tubes for the memory – then BESM would have far superseded its competition not only in the Soviet Union, but all over the world. Its projected performance of 10,000 operations per second would have been five times faster than Strela's. At that time, no machine had ever achieved such speed.

The Soviet Ministry of Machine Building and Instrument Engineering held a monopoly on storage tubes, and ignored the interests of not only Lebedev's institute but of science in the Soviet Union in general: the Ministry supplied only the Strela workers with storage tubes. Even Lavrentiev could not help Lebedev, and the BESM team found itself in a difficult and humiliating position. One could imagine Lebedev's shock in coming so close to meeting an advanced technical goal and then receiving such a blow. He had always been cooperative and offered his help, even to SKB-245. A few years earlier, when Lebedev and Bazilevsky visited Kiev, Sergei Alexeevich had explained MESM's operation in great detail to the scientists on the project, and also helped them reach an agreement with the Institute of Physics for the development of a magnetic-tape storage system. Moreover, the BESM was not a secret project as much as it was a rival. Unfortunately, the competitors did not respond in kind. Former SKB-245 project co-worker, F.N. Zikov, remembered that when Lebedev visited SKB-245 to learn about the Strela, the staff showed him the machine "...packed in boxes, ready to be shipped out."

Without access to cathode ray tubes for BESM's memory, Lebedev was forced to use acoustic mercury-delay line storage tubes, reducing BESM's performance to Strela's level and causing many problems. The amount of mercury needed for rapid access storage at full volume needed to be several hundred kilograms. The memory included 70 mercury tubes, each nearly one meter long: 64 were for storage, one tube was made for clock rate, and 5 served as spares. The mercury tubes had been developed in 1949 on Lebedev's order at the Institute of Automation. All of the tubes were placed inside a giant thermostat, which in turn was installed in a special room equipped with an exhaust hood, where work with mercury could be carried out.

The electronic parts of each channel were assembled in one large standard unit. The control panels and power supply units were substantial, while the external dimensions of the memory panels occupied an entire room. It was located at the end of a corridor on the first floor, a sizeable distance from the arithmetic unit, which was connected by cables carefully soldered onto foil. A large console for each of the mercury memory units included a dot-matrix indicator, a very elaborate console that simplified the life of the shift engineer by allowing him to examine each of the 64 channels. The layout of the memory unit was further complicated by the analog and electronic schema that worked in a closed ring circuit. Yet Lebedev worked tirelessly to adjust the rapid access memory. For two months, he practically lived in the room where the rapid access memory was located. According to Elena Petrovna Landera, "When Sergei Alexeevich made construction decisions, he rarely stopped halfway, and often went to great lengths to make any additional mechanical and assembly adjustments himself."

By the summer of 1952, the machine was basically completed and the adjustment phase had begun. All designers of the machine took part in the work, which continued around the clock. The main defects were in the acoustic-mercury tubes. Many of them burned out during the first hours of operation. But if a tube had already worked several hundred hours, then it was much less likely to fail.

By April 1953 the BESM was commissioned by the State Committee to go into operation and the design engineers stepped aside for the mathematicians. Even though in the beginning the machine performed at below capacity, it was able to solve several national economic problems. Strela had been completed at the same time and had been approved for serial production. Its creators had been awarded I, II, and III degree State prizes. Chief designer Bazilevsky was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor.^[10]

On the recommendation of academician Lavrentiev, who had become a vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Sergei Alexeevich was appointed as the director of the Institute for Precision Mechanics and he was also elected to be a member of the Academy. At the election banquet, the son of Otto Yulievich Schmidt, Sigurd Ottovich, proposed a toast: "Today we have elected as academicians two distinguished scientists—S.A. Lebedev and A.D. Sakharov!"^[11] In 1956, when the BESM had been commissioned by the State Committee again (this time it was made with vacuum storage tubes), S.A. Lebedev was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. The other main designers also received State prizes.

^[8] Author's Note: SKB was the general Russian abbreviation for Special Construction Bureau, whose task was the design and preparation of any product for mass production.

^[9] Editor's Note: In the United States, Vannevar Bush led the effort to build the first differential analyzer at MIT beginning in the 1930s.

^[10] Author's Note: This was the highest state award presented for the most valuable work completed in a specific field.

^[11] Author's Note: Otto Schmidt was a renowned polar explorer. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was the chief designer of the Soviet H-Bomb and later in his life a human rights advocate.

The First Computing Center

In February 1955 the Soviet Union's Council of Ministers passed a resolution to create the first Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences; academician Dorodnitsyn was appointed as the new director. Located at the V.A. Steklov Mathematics Institute, the center was given two computers: a BESM, and a Strela. Although both Strela and BESM worked around the clock, they could not keep up with the endless stream of problems assigned to them. Because of the urgency of the requested calculations, the Chairman of Ministries of the Soviet Union, N.A. Bulganin, had to prepare the computers' weekly usage schedule himself. According to Dorodnitsyn, the number of people on the calculation teams frequently exceeded the sixty-nine permanent staff members at the computing center. But, people came to the computing center not only to solve problems, but also to study programming. Because of this, an Ural-1 and an Ural-2 – machines from another computer line – were installed at the center and used mainly for training and instruction.

The Academy Presidium created a commission to compare the operational performance of the BESM and Strela. The commission unanimously concluded that BESM had better prospects for development. Only after this resolution was passed did the Institute for Precision Mechanics receive the vacuum storage tubes that would enhance BESM's capacity. By this time it was already the end of 1954, beginning of 1955. As soon as the memory unit had a full set of vacuum storage tubes, the BESM began to operate at full power. Even two years later, the BESM remained on par with the best American computers and was the fastest in Europe. On average, BESM was performing 8,000 three-address operations per second; its maximum speed was 10,000 operations per second.

Later versions of the BESM turned out to be among the best operating computers in Europe.

In 1958, BESM went into serial production. By contrast, no more Strela models were ever produced after the original seven. The Strela that had been at the Academy of Sciences Computing Center was given to the Mosfilm Studio Complex in Moscow to use on movie sets.

"It Will Be a Good Little Machine!"

The Soviet government's rigid management was not the only cause for the long delays in BESM's mass production. The new M-20 computer – conceived by Lebedev soon after his initial defeat in the competition with Bazilevsky – was also to blame. The "20" referred to an anticipated performance of 20,000 operations per second. Lebedev himself recommended the M-20, not the BESM, for mass production. All the prerequisites for the M-20's success were in place: workers had finished the development of the new high-performance elements, the most up-to-date ferrite memory was installed, and the scientific team gained more members and experience. In addition and perhaps most importantly, Sergei Alexeevich had also secured a governmental resolution ordering Bazilevsky's SKB-245 project to cooperate with Lebedev and the Institute for Precision Mechanics. The Institute was directed to develop the machine philosophy, structure, design, and fundamental elements. Technical documentation and the experimental model would be constructed by SKB-245. Lebedev was appointed chief designer and constructor of the project and Mikhail Kirillovich Sulim (of SKB-245) his deputy.

Three men led the M-20 project: Lebedev, Mikhail Romanovich Shura-Bura, and Golovistikov. Lebedev developed the machine philosophy and structure, Shura-Bura formulated a system of commands and studied mathematical problems, and Golovistikov organized their results into specific layouts based on dynamic elements (mini vacuum tubes) that he had developed himself; he also designed systems for the arithmetic and control units. The structure of the machine, system of commands, and layout of the main units were completed quickly. Many new logic operations were employed and address modification introduced, which considerably simplified the programming. For increasing the speed and performance of the arithmetic unit, they developed a rigid command system that amplified signal speed. As a result, the execution time for simple adding operations decreased significantly, allowing for an increase in speed and performance. Moreover, it became possible to make shifts immediately on 1, 2, and 4 bit-positions, which accelerated the order alignment and normalization of the results from addition and subtraction operations. These and many other innovations had little effect on the number of vacuum tubes used. Actually, the number of diodes used increased, but over time the vacuum tubes were replaced by small but reliable germanium semiconductors.

At the same time, the team worked on the creation of ferrite memory, disk file memory, and peripheral devices. Near the end of 1955, construction of a prototype commenced at the institute. In 1956, adjustments on the machine were performed not only by the coworkers in Laboratory No. 1, but by scientists from other organizations as well. Many enterprises were interested in the rapid completion of the work because the Soviet Union was in desperate need of this class of computers.

Golovistikov remembered how Sergei Alexeevich exclaimed once, "It will be a good little machine!" At the beginning of 1957, the experimental model of the M-20 at SKB-245 was completed. Everyone had to regroup quickly and begin fine-tuning it. Lebedev assumed the most active role, just as he had done with the BESM's adjustment, while Sulim settled the organizational problems. But at first things did not go smoothly. Although all of the dynamic elements were repeatedly checked on the small models, their reliability once installed in the actual machine body was uncertain. Workers noted the problem during the adjustments phase, while the machine was still at the institute, but failed to diagnose them due to the brisk pace of the difficult development schedule of the experimental model. At SKB-245, some technical workers spread rumors about the inadequacy of the dynamic elements and the flaws in the elemental base. They proposed to do everything the old way, by employing a large number of tubes. Sergei Alexeevich and his team were understandably disappointed, because everything had been going so smoothly up until this time, and suddenly an obstacle appeared. As a result, Sulim got in trouble with the SKB-245 managers, who demanded that the work be completed in an unreasonably short amount of time.

Considering the M-20 situation, Sergei Alexeevich resolved to put the BESM into mass-production. There were several favorable conditions that substantially reduced the amount of work and allowed him to make that decision. First, the team had the ready-made components of M-20, which were suitable for use in the BESM. Second, they had already fabricated reliable mini-tubes that possessed the same features as larger tubes used earlier in the BESM, and high-voltage germanium diodes, which permitted replacement of the tube diodes used in the BESM without any modifications to the construction plans. Third, the ferrite memory of the M-20 was available and could be installed in the BESM instead of storage tubes.

The leading engineers Kiril Sergeevich Neslukhovsky, A.N. Zimariov, Vladimir Andreevich Melnikov, A.V. Avaev and others, spearheaded BESM's mass-production preparations. Since they had not been involved in the M-20 project or with any other specialized machine, they were able to complete all of the preparatory work for mass-producing BESM in less than nine months, using only the available technical documentation. BESM-2, which outwardly resembled the M-20, went into production at the beginning of 1958. Simultaneously, Golovistikov, Valery Nasarovich Lout and Andrei Andreevich Sokolov, refined the M-20 and improved its reliability.

Later that year the State Committee reviewed the M-20 and named it "the fastest computer in the world." After that, the M-20 and the BESM-2 both went into mass-production. The need for high-speed computers was so great that M-20 was initially delivered only to the institutions working on the most critical projects in the Soviet Union. Additional production of the BESM-2 slowly reduced the Soviet Union's high demand for computers designed for scientific calculations.

The scientific teams at both the Institute for Precision Mechanics and SKB-245 were nominated for Lenin Prizes for the M-20, but Lebedev suffered the same fate this time as he had with the MESM: the nomination was rejected. It still remains uncertain why this happened. I only know that one member of the State Awards committee, former director of the Institute for Precision Mechanics Bruevich, expressed his personal opinion about the technical level of the M-20, stating that at that time, the America's Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC) was also performing 20,000 operations per second. This was not true. Bruevich failed to mention that NORC used in excess of 8000 vacuum tubes, whereas the M-20 only required 1600. Although he approved M-20's launch into mass production, his remarks also influenced the committee's decision to not award the Lenin Prize to Lebedev's team.

Despite his rivals, Lebedev was fortunate because he truly loved his work. While preparing this manuscript I visited one of the few still-living M-20 designers, Golovistikov, who spoke warmly about Lebedev, his ability to inspire his colleagues to be creative, and about his immense personal charm. Golovistikov remembered the period when BESM and M-20 were developed, specifically about how Sergei Alexeevich lived at that time, in a cramped sub-basement room, but the joy he extracted from his work allowed him to ignore all discomfort. At the end of our conversation I asked Petr Petrovich if he had any critical observations about his teacher. "There is one!" he replied, "After the BESM and M-20 were finished, I was appointed as the director of the laboratory for designing new computer components. My scientific work suffered because I had to deal with managerial issues, and I feel that I gave less to science than I could have." Like Sergei Alexeevich, Petr Petrovich was interested in neither high positions nor rewards, but in the work itself—to invent and create a more advanced computer. I will discuss the BESM series of machines in more detail in Chapter Four.

There Are No Prophets in My Country!

In the 1960s, Soviet scientists proposed building third-generation integrated circuit computers. The majority believed that it was necessary to develop a family of software and hardware-compatible computers. But that was the only point that they agreed upon. Lebedev, having demonstrated the soundness of his ideas and his ability to predict future prospects for development of computer technology, proposed to create a family of small and mid-size general use computers. In addition, he proposed developing a separate supercomputer because its technology would be enormously different (structurally and architecturally) than that of the smaller general use machines.

By the late 1960s, Lebedev, Glushkov, and their followers believed that Soviet scientists had accumulated a significant amount of experience in computer technology and had a considerable production potential. They wanted to collaborate with large Western European computer manufacturers in developing a fourth-generation machine before the Americans did. Lebedev's political adversaries proposed a different option – to duplicate the American third-generation IBM-360 system, created several years earlier. Although no scientists of Lebedev's caliber were among them, they were the political figures who had decision-making power. The Soviet government passed a resolution to develop a Unified System of Computers [in Russian: Yedinaya Systema Elektronnoi Vuichislit'elnoi Mashini, or ES EVM], reverse-engineered from the configurations of the IBM-360^[12]. The Institute for Precision Mechanics was not mentioned in the resolution. When writing the resolution, its authors tried to persuade Sergei Alexeevich to take part in the development of the ES EVM. After consulting with the leading specialists, Lebedev refused, saying: "But we are going to make something extraordinary!" This meant that he would continue his work on supercomputers no matter what.

The decision to copy the IBM-360 may not have had any real consequences for the Institute for Precision Mechanics or any other computer technology outfit if not for a rival organization, the Radio Industry Ministry's Scientific Research Institute of Electronic Computer Technology – or NISEVT [in Russian: Nauchno-Isledovat'elskii Tsenter Elektronno Vuichislit'elnoi Tekhniki], which aspired to be the leader. Sulim, then 40 years old, was appointed Deputy Minister of the Radio Industry. He understood the importance of computer technology for the national economy, and in 1967 initiated a government resolution to construct computer-manufacturing factories throughout the Soviet Union. The resolution also included the creation of the mammoth NISEVT.

According to Sulim's plan, the core computer development organizations, such as SKB-245, the Schetmash, and the Institute for Precision Mechanics, were all to be housed within the NISEVT. But this part of the proposal failed. NISEVT was set up at the SKB-245 – the old rival of the Institute for Precision Mechanics. By now, the latter had established its own unique working culture. Its highly qualified staff could easily estimate the advantages and disadvantages of computers developed abroad and improve their own machines accordingly. In contrast, scientific teams at the huge NISEVT were formed in a hurry and lacked cohesiveness. Even the first-class specialists recruited by NISEVT (only a handful, including Rameev and Vladimir Konstantinovich Levin), failed to fit in or to make any positive changes in the organization. NISEVT continued to clone obsolete foreign computers, while the Soviet government appointed it as the leading group for the development of the ES EVM.

Aware of the government's final decision to copy the IBM-360 system, Sergei Alexeevich – a chain smoker – ignored a life-threatening pulmonary illness to seek a meeting with Minister Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin, to warn him that cloning the IBM-360 would lead to the demise of the Soviet computer industry. He was refused and sent to the Minister's deputy. The visit did not yield any results. After that, Lebedev's illness intensified. Occasionally, there was hope that he would recover, but not for long. Lebedev's strong constitution, undermined by years of stress and endless work, was failing. He was awarded the Order of Lenin on his 70th birthday, and it was presented to him at home. By now, Lebedev was very ill and rarely got out of bed. The prize brought him little pleasure because the cause, to which he had dedicated the most productive years of his life, had suffered.

On July 3, 1974, Golovistikov returned to Moscow from Kiev and visited Sergei Alexeevich at the hospital. Golovistikov told him he had recently visited Feofania, where the MESM had been created. Lebedev listened carefully but did not look at him, staring off into the distance. Petr Petrovich remembered that look for the rest of his life. Then all of the sudden, the gravely ill Lebedev became excited. Perhaps he recalled those hard but happy years spent in Kiev, where he was able to realize his ideas. That was the last day in the life of a great worker, a scientific genius, and a very good man – Sergei Alexeevich Lebedev.

People such as Lebedev stood in the way of the expanding Soviet bureaucracy and its thoughtless decisions. Unfortunately for the Soviet Union, Lebedev's predictions came true. In the United Stated and other nations, computer development continued growing in the directions that he originally proposed. By then, foreign countries were developing high-performance supercomputers and personal computers plus a series of smaller, less powerful computers for specialized applications.

The Soviet government spent enormous sums of money on the ES EVM computer family. Copying the IBM-360 caused many problems, extended project deadlines and strained design team efforts. Of course, there was some value in copying this obsolete system in terms of mastering the new technology, developing a vast complex of peripheral units and acquiring new skills in "Sovietizing" computer systems from abroad. Overall, very little progress was made, particularly because IBM-360 documentation was difficult to procure. If one stops to think about the damage caused to the Soviet computer science, to our nation, and to European interests by attempting to make the IBM-360 work for us instead of using our own formidable brainpower and technical skills, it becomes clear that an enormous expenditure of labor, time, and money resulted in marginal benefits at best. The new political reformers – Viktor Yushchenko, Vladimir Putin, and others, must remember the role of science and the impact the truly outstanding scientific minds have on the technological progress and the society as a whole. We must not forget the immortal, heroic deeds of Lebedev, the founder of Soviet computer technology, nor the glorious years during the creation of the MESM and the work at the Lebedev's institute, which greatly advanced the construction of electronic computers by relying on its talented people.

^[12] Editor's Note: Those computer scientists who supported the decision to go with the IMB-360 argue that their ES-EVM series turned out to be very reliable and productive.