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).
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)