YouTube video from Moscow, Feb. 1991, of Leon Theremin teaching Paul Lansky how to play "Glinka's Skylark," on a theremin, the same tune he taught Lenin to play. Theremin was 95-years-old in the video. From DVD, "The Early Gurus of Electronic Music."

Martin Vennard for the BBC World Service looks into the 90th anniversary of when inventor Leon Theremin first showed Russian leader Vladimir Lenin his new wireless, hand-free musical instrument. He writes:

"Leon Theremin had come to the Bolshevik leader's attention after inventing a revolutionary electronic musical instrument that was played without being touched. Theremin was nervous before meeting Lenin, but later said the demonstration of his invention, which became known as the Theremin, had gone well. 'Leon Theremin was very impressed by the meeting with Lenin in the Kremlin. He was a young Bolshevik at that time and he was very excited by the changes in the country and he respected Lenin a lot,' says his grand-niece Lydia Kavina. Lenin was so impressed he sent Theremin across Russia to show off his instrument.”

Best known in the United States for sci-fi and horror movie soundtrack sounds in the 1950s and on The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" in the 1960s, the theremin still is a revolutionary musical instrument and transmission art tool. The theremin produces electromagnetic field that hand movement affects, adjusting pitch and volume without touching the instrument, but by moving ones hands about the air. [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="220" caption="Leon Theremin, from Wikipedia."][/caption]His 15 minutes of fame in the United States came in early 1929, when he showed off the theremin to much acclaim with sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall. Just as RCA brought the still-expensive instrument into mass production, the stock market crashed, and RCA stopped making theremins, Vennard reports. Clearly, both governments hoped he could invent some fantastic weapon, and Albert Glinsky, author of the Theremin biography "Ether Music and Espionage" says Theremin was spying in the U.S., and others speculate he was kidnapped back to the Soviet Union when his disappeared from New York. In 1939, he was sent to the gulags in Russia. There have been reports that Theremin did later invent wireless easvesdropping devices for the Soviets, and he was allowed one trip to the U.S. in 1991 before he died in Moscow in 1993. Read the full story at the BBC World Service.