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When you think of the early history of the computer you probably think of people and projects in the USA and the UK, with, perhaps a passing reference to Zuse's computers in Germany. If Russia, or as it was then the USSR, is mentioned at all it is usually in connection with the copies of western machines, the "three six-skis" of the 1970s, or the miniature valve based avionic and space computers that were rumoured still be in use up until recently! However Soviet Russia had its own early computer program and its own computer creators - and neither were cheap western copies! Russia's own "father of the computer" was Sergei Alekseevich Lebedev.
Sergei Alekseevich Lebedev 1902-1974
Sergei Lebedev was born in 1902 inNizhny Novgorod. Four years after the Russian revolution he entered the Electrical Engineering Department of the Moscow Higher Technical School where he specialised in high voltage technologies. He worked on the difficult and very practical problem of running generators in parallel. After graduation he became a teacher and researcher into the construction of power stations and transmission line technology.
Scientific calculations were the impetus behind most of the earlyefforts to build computers and the situation in Russia was nodifferent. It was the need to solve sets of linear and non-linear differential equations that drove Sergei to think of using mechanical methods of computation. One of Lebedev's colleagues became interested in mechanical analog computers after reading about Vannevar Bush's differential analysers. In the 1930s and 1940s most of the Russian work on the development of computers was centred on analog devices.
In 1943 Lebedev returned to Moscow as the head of a new department for the automation of electrical systems at the Electrical Engineering Institute and in 1946 he was appointed director of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences where he started a series of seminars on the problems of automatic computation. At first the emphasis was on analog devices but slowly Lebedev and his colleges turned their attention to digital computers. Their discussions became increasingly specific and many of the fundamental ideas of computer design were evolved in this theoretical atmosphere.
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