Theremin
By 
Sometimes you get cited in the strangest places:
This paper traces the overarching structural context for owning and controlling knowledge and ideas in the Soviet Union through the personal trajectory of [Lev] Theremin. He had his work recognized by both patents and Soviet inventor’s certificates, introduced as a socialist alternative to patents at about the same time Theremin began his inventive career, but in many of his dealings with the state his work was also classified, sometimes secretly rewarded but in other instances unrecognized. His inventions were created both voluntarily and as a result of forced labour.
On the functioning of the early Soviet patent system:
For the Bolsheviks, the patent system was inherently capitalist and thereby inherently flawed. For them, it failed to serve the masses, it suppressed their talents, and their efforts were used against them to enrich the capitalists. Soviet writers emphasized that it was not the inventors who became rich, but those who exploited the patents. The ideological critique also claimed that patents choked the flow of technical information as patent holders strove to limit as much as possible the disclosure part of the bargain (Martens, 2010, pp.32–3). 3
In 1919, Lenin issued a Decree on Inventing which stipulated that all inventions that had been pronounced useful by the Committee for Inventing could be declared state property. This could be done by means of an agreement with the inventor or, if necessary, against the inventor’s will. All inventions made on Russian soil should be made public in Russia before abroad. The decree recognized the inventor’s avtorskoe pravo (author’s right) which was expressed by the granting of a certificate (Ulyanov and Bonch-Bruyevich, 1919). As legal scholar Boris Mamlyuk (2011) has pointed out, the very notion of owning an idea or a work of art can be seen as contradictory to socialist principles of mass production and commonality of title. At the heart of the issue is the relation between an individual and society, where not only the individual but also ‘the social medium in which he or she worked’ would be considered creators of a work (Mamlyuk, 2011, p.560). 4 The certificate sprang out of the view that the state is the extension of the people, and thus, what is state owned belongs to the people.
The new inventor’s certificate 5 that replaced patents testified to the inventor’s right as an author of the invention but declared the invention itself to be a state property. Strictly speaking, it did not grant any property rights to the inventor. The inventor, or author, lost his or her ownership of the invention, but was entitled to compensation for its exploitation. 6 The new Soviet system was thus an attempt to avoid reliance on private property rights, and the certificate arrangement that emerged was intended to promote the free flow of information and to allow for broad and fast diffusion of new inventions and improvements throughout the Soviet Union. In relation to this, it should be noted that the Soviet Union had no institution of trade secrets (Lebedenko, 2022, 2024).
Legal scholar Svitlana Lebedenko also points out that innovation in the Soviet Union in many ways functioned as an economy of esteem, where monopoly rights in a patent system were replaced by other rewards and incentives (Lebedenko, 2024, p.14). In the Soviet Union, other rewards than monetary were considered important means to incentivize invention (see Hughes, 1945, for an overview). These would include both symbolic awards and access to privileges, goods and services. To some extent, prizes and the idea of socialist competition were also part of the system to incentivize invention – and in relation to Theremin’s biography, the most important prize was the Stalin Prize.
And yet the Soviets needed some kind of system in place that could negotiate with the capitalist world (which had a variety of ad hoc intellectual property protections) and that could spur some degree of innovation beyond the “esteem economy.” Anyway, read the rest; it’s fascinating as a story and as an academic account:
In 1964 Theremin ‘resurfaced’. While retired from the KGB, he was like ‘a walking file cabinet of state secrets’, as Glinsky terms it, and this cast a shadow over his life for many years. At 68, he re-entered the workforce. He first got a job at the USSR Sound Recording Institute, a studio laboratory working with sound effects for radio. Here, he had the opportunity to familiarize himself with the development of Russian electronic music. He had nearly four decades to make up, having had nothing to do with the field since he left for America in 1927. However, the Communist Party of the USSR had a very conservative taste in culture and electronic music was considered suspect. It was neither flourishing in the 1960s nor had it taken any great leaps since the 1920s. The institute studio was closed in 1965 and Theremin found a job at the acoustics laboratory of the Moscow Conservatory, where he had some contacts. As a technician, he created various devices, three of which were later awarded inventor’s certificates. He also used the opportunities provided by the laboratory to develop his own interest in electronic music and contributed to the lab’s seminar series (Kovalyova, 2008). He started to reconnect with what there was of an electronic music community in the Soviet Union, wrote a few papers and attended a few conferences.
Bulat Galeyev, who became his friend and later biographer, recounts their first meeting at a conference at the Moscow Conservatory in 1967. Galeyev was 50 years younger than Theremin, but shared his interest in physics and music and had known about the inventor since childhood. But he had also, like so many others, assumed Theremin had died in the Stalinist repressions. Approaching Theremin after his presentation, Galeyev could only ask in disbelief: ‘Lev Sergeevich, are you really still alive?’ The reply: ‘You are not the first one with this question. I just gave an interview to an American journalist’ (Galeyev, 1995, p.7). The American journalist was Harold Schonberg of the New York Times, who got wind of Theremin’s continued existence through an image in Gleb Anfilov’s Physics and Music (1966) and paid a visit to the Moscow Conservatory to interview the inventor.