Theremin Blind
77
is unlikely to have approved an award under suspicious circumstances. Also,
now that KGB files have been opened, no such infonnation seems to have been
discovered that would support Kavina’s allegation.
Theremin claims he worked for the KGB from age 42 until age 67
working on “different bad things.” After working for the KGB, he went to work
for the Moscow Conservatory of Music—where he remained for ten
years—making electronic cellos and other instruments. He described one of
these as a polyphonic version of the Theremin that could create several voices at
one time, as with a choir or orchestra. He said he used the instniment to
illustrate his lectures in the Soviet university, until the officials lost interest in
music. It still existed, he thought, “dismantled and ruined” somewhere at the
university (Mattis 3). He was a popular teacher with children, and he seemed to
love his work (Glinsky 310).
By pure chance he was recognized by a correspondent from The New'
York Times, and some major media coverage followed. According to his niece,
the Vice President of the Conservatory said “the people don’t need electronic
music. Electricity is for killing traitors in the electric chair.” Theremin was fired,
his laboratory was closed, and all of his equipment was hauled out and destroyed
with an ax (Martin documentary).
Later in life, Theremin was allowed to return to New York, and in the
1980s he began to retell his story. His history is still shrouded in mystery, and
some of his statements were inconsistent. For the most part, he admits to having
spied and done “bad things” for the Russian government. He claims they finally
imported him back to Russia, where he was thrown in prison. Other western
accounts tell a similar history: Theremin was intimidated and coerced by the
KGB, for whom he was forced to work.
But as we have seen, Glinsky tells a different story in Theremin—Ether
Music and Espionage. He presents Theremin as a loyal, dogmatic Communist
through and through, who lived and breathed for the Kremlin. Glinsky surmises
that Theremin longed to return to his native country—despite Stalin’s bloody
purges—^and that he never really assimilated completely to American culture,
and was in fact very disdainful of it (Glinsky 180).
Theremin’s work here had ended, Glinsky concludes, and his mounting
legal and financial problems forced him to abscond from the country in total
secrecy—not even telling his wife or his closest friends. Glinsky theorizes that
Theremin orchestrated the “kidnapping” himself, which was really nothing more
than a hasty exit, or perhaps a daring escape (Glinsky 189).
The truth will probably never be known, and Theremin’s own
comments support Glinsky’s interpretation, but it seems unlikely that he would
desert his relatively new wife and friends in such a manner. Theremin’s story is
fascinating and paradoxical: from the innocence of the Beach Boys’s “Good
Vibrations” (which features a Theremin), and the zany comedy of Jerry Lewis
experimenting with a scientist’s Theremin in The Delicate Delinquent, to
Theremin rubbing shoulders with Lenin and Stalin, wiring Alcatraz, perhaps