With Love, From Russia
Hey. Nobody likes a showoff. Nevertheless, this is still pretty amazing. Pamela Kurstin is “playing” the theremin, a musical instrument played without ANY physical contact.
Invented in 1919 by its namesake, Leon Theremin, it’s reported that when the Russian physicist/inventor showed his contraption to Lenin, the Bolshevik leader became so enthralled he learned to play it too.
But it’s another one of Theremin’s inventions that reeeeally got The Kremlin excited — his prolific secret listening device: The Thing (a.k.a. The Great Seal Bug).
The story goes that in 1945, Soviet school children presented a replica of the Great Seal of the United States carved in wood to the U.S. ambassador as a “gesture of friendship”, acknowledging its World War II ally. Tricky tricky reds. Concealed inside was this covert bug. The dummy seal went on to hang in the ambassador’s residential office in Moscow for the first seven years of the Cold War, intercepting confidential conversations until its accidental discovery by a British radio operator (who overheard American conversations on an open radio channel), in 1952.
Bygones. For his contribution to the advancement of Soviet espionage technology, Theremin was awarded the Сталинская премия prize. He passed away in 1993 in Moscow at the age of 97.
(Theremin’s legacy lives on, his grand-niece and protege Lydia Kavina is a theremin virtuoso and the world’s leading musician on the instrument.)
