In many parts of the world, today is Christmas—but in Russia and Eastern Europe, which use the Orthodox calendar , December 25 is just an ordinary day. Little known to most, however, it’s also a day that marks the anniversary of a key development in European computer history. Sixty years ago today, in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, the Soviet Academy of Sciences finally granted formal recognition to Sergey Lebedev ’s pioneering MESM project . MESM, a Russian abbreviation for “Small Electronic Calculating Machine,” is regarded as the earliest, fully operational electronic computer in the Soviet Union—and indeed continental Europe. Recently we were privileged to get a first-hand account of Lebedev’s achievements from Boris Malinovsky, who worked on MESM and is now a leading expert on Soviet-era computing. Turn on captions for the English translation. Described by some as the “Soviet Alan Turing ,” Sergey Lebedev had been thinking about computing as far back as the 1930’s, until interrupted by war. In 1946 he was made director of Kyiv’s Institute of Electrical Engineering. Soon after, stories of “electronic brains” in the West began to circulate and his interest in computing revived. Sergey Lebedev* Initially, Lebedev’s superiors were skeptical, and some in his team felt working on a “calculator”—how they thought of a computer—was a step backward compared to electrical and space systems research

Originally posted here: 
Remembering a remarkable Soviet computing pioneer