Sergei Lebedev

Sergei Lebedev is born to Alexei Lebedev and Anastasia Mavrina. The house is 'crammed with books'; his older sister Tatyana Mavrina will become a famous painter.

The Lebedev family settles in Moscow around this time. Sergei (chess player, Oka-crossing swimmer, pianist who plays Beethoven and Grieg) prepares intensively for the entrance exam of the Bauman Higher Technical School, which he enters in 1921.

Lebedev finishes the Moscow Higher Technical School under the electrification pioneer Karl Krug. His diploma thesis deals with the stability of parallel power stations within the GOELRO electrification plan. He then joins the All-Union Electrotechnical Institute (VEI).

Lebedev marries Alisa Grigoryevna Steinberg, a cellist and Gnessin Institute graduate from a Jewish grain merchant family.

After his 1933 monograph on the stability of parallel electrical systems, Lebedev becomes a professor and soon heads the automation department at VEI. Colleagues note he is sincerely glad when others win awards: 'He never cared for honors or fame of any kind.'

The passionate mountaineer, aged about 35, is said to have climbed the 5,642-meter Elbrus; a colleague recalled crawling the last 50 meters while Lebedev 'boldly leapt over the rocks'. His later supercomputer series will be named Elbrus.

When the talented engineer Iosifyan is fired because his father had been an Armenian priest, Lebedev immediately invites him into his own department. Throughout the terror years he repeatedly finds positions for politically endangered colleagues.

Mark Blumenfeld, economist and Trotskyist husband of Alisa's sister, is reported to have been executed; her father and her sister are said to have been repressed as well. Alisa hates Stalin for the rest of her life.

Lebedev is awarded the degree of Doctor of Technical Sciences (bypassing the usual candidate degree) for his theory of artificial stability of power supply systems.

His daughter Natalia is born, one of the couple's three children. Natalia Lebedeva (1939-2025) will become the leading historian of the Katyn massacre: the daughter of a Soviet hero academician documenting Stalin's crimes.

Lebedev locks himself in the bathroom by the light of a gas burner and writes 'ones and zeros' for hours: his first work on binary arithmetic, as his wife Alisa later recalled.

Evacuated with his institute to the Urals, Lebedev develops a stabilization system for tank cannons allowing accurate aiming at full speed (credited with saving many tank crews), and later a self-homing warhead for an aerial torpedo. His family is evacuated.

Lebedev constructs an electronic analog computer for solving systems of ordinary differential equations, his bridge from power engineering to computing.

Lebedev is elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR.

Elected a full member of the Ukrainian Academy in February 1945, Lebedev is appointed director of the Institute of Energetics in war-ruined Kiev.