Behind the Iron Curtain

In 1938 Leon Theremin suddenly left New York for home. The reasons are not fully known; among them were tax debts and anxiety about the approaching war. In March 1939 he was arrested under the article on aiding the international bourgeoisie and given eight years in the camps. The inventor whom Carnegie Hall had applauded went to Kolyma.

He did not stay in Kolyma long. The camp authorities took notice of his technical proposals, and in 1940 Theremin was transferred to TsKB-29, a prison design bureau where the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev and the future chief rocket designer Sergei Korolev worked under guard. There Theremin was busy with a quite different kind of electronics. One of his systems, “Buran”, aimed an infrared beam at a window and reconstructed the conversation in the room from the trembling of the glass.