Creator of the MESM and BESM, founder of Soviet computing
As the IBM-compatible line began to dominate Soviet computing in the early 1970s, the ailing Lebedev insisted: 'We must not follow their path. We must go our own way.'
Founder of Soviet computer engineering. He built the MESM (continental Europe's first stored-program computer) in a war-damaged monastery outside Kiev (1951) and the BESM-1 (1953). As ITMiVT director for twenty years, he oversaw 15 computer types; his machines performed nuclear weapons calculations, space-flight trajectories, and drove the first operational anti-ballistic-missile system. Elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1953 as its first computing-device specialist, he received the Hero of Socialist Labour (1956), Lenin, Stalin, and State Prizes. He opposed the Cold War shift to IBM-compatible copying, insisting on independent parallel architecture, and his students built the Elbrus supercomputer series. Posthumously awarded the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award (1996).
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1928–1946Researcher and Head of Automation Dept., All-Union Electrotechnical Institute (AEI); professor, Moscow Power Engineering Institute
- 1946–1950Director, Institute of Energetics → Institute of Electrotechnics, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences
- 1948–1951Led development of the MESM — first stored-program electronic computer in the USSR and continental Europe
- 1950–1953Head of laboratory at ITMiVT, completed BESM-1
- 1953–1973Director of ITMiVT — oversaw development of 15 computer types including BESM-2, M-20, and BESM-6
- 1953–1974Full member, USSR Academy of Sciences (specializing in computing devices)
From power engineering to the MESM
Lebedev began as an electrical engineer studying the stability and automatic control of power systems. After graduating from the Moscow Higher Technical School in 1928, he worked at the All-Union Electrotechnical Institute, where in the 1930s he led work on parallel operation of power systems and headed the automation department. When the institute was evacuated to the Urals during the war, he designed a stabilizing system for tank guns and an automatic homing warhead for aircraft torpedoes. In 1945 he built the Soviet Union’s first electronic analogue computer, for solving systems of differential equations.
In 1946 he moved to Kiev to direct the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Energetics. After its division, he headed the Institute of Electrotechnics, researching power-supply control and devices to improve grid stability. Demand for large-scale calculations grew with power engineering, postwar industrial reconstruction, nuclear physics, and rocketry; in autumn 1948 he began the MESM project. An analytical seminar with mathematicians and physicists in early 1949 established the machine’s mathematical requirements and architecture. Its design included arithmetic, memory, control, and input-output units. In 1950, at Feofania outside Kiev, a team of 12 engineers and scientists and 15 technical assistants assembled and tested the machine. MESM received approval for regular operation in late 1951 and was used for scientific and engineering calculations. Lebedev later led development of the BESM computer series in Moscow.