ISSN 1019
3316, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2009, Vol. 79, No. 5, pp. 495500.

Pleiades Publishing, Ltd., 2009.

Original Russian Text I.R. Ashurbeili, A.P. Reutov, E.M. Sukharev, 2009, published in Vestnik Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, 2009, Vol. 79, No. 10, pp. 937943.

Profiles
DOI: 10.1134/S101933160905013X

A Titan of Radio Engineering

The Centennial of the Birth of Academician A.A. Raspletin
tric laboratory to develop piezoelectric crystals as part
of shortwave transmitters. He also set Raspletin the
more challenging task of designing a piezoelectric fre

quency standard. In 1932, the first technical paper by
Raspletin appeared in the journal Tekhnika radio i
slabogo toka (Radio and Low
Current Technology),
which presented his results concerning piezoelectric

crystal fabrication and adjustment and circuit design
for accurate time measurement [3].
Once in Leningrad, he began his studies to enter
the radio
engineering profession. After graduating
from the Leningrad Low
Current Technology College
in 1932, he enrolled as a radio
engineering student in
the evening department of the Leningrad Electrotech

nical Institute. During his time at the institute, he
published five more papers and obtained two inven

tors certificates. Despite his great workload, he also
joined a shortwave military unit as a consultant. He
took part in building the first shortwave radio stations
for the exploration of the Northern Sea Route.
Academician Aleksandr Andreevich Raspletin (1908
1967).

The centennial of the birth of Aleksandr

Andreevich Raspletin, a prominent Soviet researcher
and designer, has been commemorated recently. An
adventurous engineer and brilliant administrator, he
took a leading part in many R&D efforts to the benefit
of the national economy, defense, and science.
Raspletin was born on August 25, 1908, into a mer

chants family in Rybinsk near Yaroslavl [1]. As a
schoolboy, he had an interest it chemistry and physics
and played in his schools brass band before he became
fascinated by radio. He built a transceiver and began
experimenting with establishing long
range commu

nications as a member of the local ham
radio society
[2]. His dedication earned him the respect of his fellow
members; they elected him chair of the shortwave sec

tion in 1928 and selected him to represent the society
at the First All
Union Conference of Ham Radio
Operators in Moscow December 2428, 1928.
In 1930, Raspletin moved to Leningrad and took a
job at the Comintern factory. The factorys chief
researcher A.L. Mints assigned him to the piezoelec

The year 1932 was a turning point in Raspletins

career during which he became engaged in the devel

opment of television. The piezoelectric laboratory was
reorganized into part of the Central Radio Laboratory,
in which a laboratory of television and electrooptics
was set up under the leadership of V.A. Gurov, the
author of The Fundamentals of Long
Range Viewing
(Osnovy dalnovideniya). Raspletins first investigation
involved running comparative tests of receivers used in
mechanical television, for which purpose he organized
the fabrication of a batch of TV sets based on a mirror
screw and lens disk in December 1932. The results
were published in 1933 as a series of papers [4].
His work on electronic television began with devel

oping the first all
electronic television receiver, aiming
to offer a resolution of 30120 lines. In 1934 a team
led by Ya.A. Ryftin created a technology that provided
180 lines of resolution at 25 frames per second. In Sep

tember 1938, Raspletin came up with the first Soviet
TV set, named VRK, which was designed to receive
broadcasts from a newly built pilot TV center in Len

ingrad. During 19381940, pioneering efforts were
made to design a large
screen TV set for collective
viewing; the result was the TE
1 and TE
2 projection
TV sets with a screen measuring 1.0 1.2 or 2 3 m,

495

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ASHURBEILI et al.

ing worldwide as early as September, via relay stations

in Moscow.
His more ambitious idea was to design and make
portable transceivers for use on the battlefield, which
was approved in July 1941. The Sever (North) radio set
(also known as Omega) was thus created and began to
be manufactured by the Television Research Institute,
with Raspletin responsible for quality control and
compliance with the specifications (there were no mil

itary representatives at the institute). In February
1942, however, Leningrad was cut off from electricity
supply, and the production of radio sets ceased. Under
the circumstances, the decision was made to evacuate
the staff of the institute to Krasnoyarsk.
The siege of Leningrad took a heavy toll on Rasple

tin: he lost his mother and wife and many coworkers.

Raspletins 17TN
1 television (Polytechnical Museum,

Moscow).

respectively, based on the US model TK
1. As early as

1937, Raspletins team began developing the first
tabletop personal TV sets, named TI
1 and TI
2,
which were simpler variants of VRK and TK
1. In
1939, an improved model, TI
3, appeared for receiv

ing broadcasts from the TV centers in Moscow and
Leningrad. It went into mass production at the Radist
(Radio Operator) factory in Leningrad under the code
name 17TN
1. It was the first Soviet tabletop radio
and television receiver of tower configuration that
implemented electronic scanning and direct detec

tion. Later, it served as the prototype of the KVN
49,
probably the most popular Soviet TV set.
With the increasingly tense situation in Europe,
Raspletin took an interest in military applications of
television. He and Ryftin initiated a project to develop
a TV system for air reconnaissance. Unfortunately, it
was abandoned after the Great Patriotic War broke
out.
In 1941 the German aggression against the Soviet
Union made it impossible to continue any work on
television. Raspletin and his coworkers spent over two
weeks constructing the Luga Defense Line as part of
the war effort. In August, all radio broadcasting sta

tions in Leningrad were rendered inoperable except
for the medium
wave one (RV
70) in the Petrograd

skii district, but its transmitters were not powerful
enough to reach Moscow. Its chief A.I. Mironov and
Raspletin came up with a way to convert available
ultrashortwave TV transmitters to shortwave radio
transmitters, so that the radio station began broadcast

During the war, Raspletin became interested in

military electronic technologies for early warning or
guidance. In later years, he was concerned with auto

mated targeting systems, whether ground
based, air

borne, or spaceborne [5].
In fact, he advanced the concept of a TV facility to
guide fighter aircraft as early as 1938. The idea found a
number of successful implementations. In particular,
it was developed by E.I. Golovanevskii into the con

cept of a TV system for transmitting data from the
Redut (Redoubt) radar to the headquarters of the Len

ingrad Front. Golovanevskiis proposal was put into
operation to effectively become the first command

and
control system for air
defense electronic facili

ties.
In September 1942, Raspletin was transferred to
the Special Design Bureau at the Lenin All
Union
Electrical Engineering Institute in Moscow, where he
was appointed the research supervisor of a team
charged with creating a TV system for guiding fighters;
the effort was given the code name RD. In November
1943, Raspletins team was transferred to All
Union
Research Institute No. 108, which was established on
July 4 to develop radar technology. Intended for the
Leningrad Air
Defense Army, the RD system was one
of the main projects of the institute. It was presented
for acceptance tests in late 1944, and passed them in
the battlefield near Breslau (now Wroclaw) and Lenin

grad.
In 1946, Raspletin worked on the design of a radar
installation, code
named RT or SNAR
1, for front

line detection and accurate location of ground targets
such as tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artil

lery positions.
He came up with three inventions, the most nota

ble of which was a radio
engineering technique to pro

tect armored vehicles, devised in collaboration with
the prominent physicist M.A. Leontovich, P.Z. Stas
(director), and A.M. Kugushev (chief engineer).

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A TITAN OF RADIO ENGINEERING

In 1947 he conducted pioneering research on mil

limeter
wave technology; these efforts were named
Taiga and Les (Forest).
Returning to Raspletins contributions to televi

sion, we note his conception of a mass
produced TV
set, which was implemented by A.Ya. Klopov,
D.S. Kheifets, and others, as a single
and a three

channel model (T
1 and T
2), and produced by the
Kozitskii Factory in Leningrad.
Raspletin was a brilliant proponent and a coauthor
of almost all Soviet TV standards [6]. His efforts cul

minated in the adoption of a 625
line national stan

dard on December 31, 1955 [7]. Indeed, almost all of
his conceptions in the field of television have proved
viable.
In 1950, Raspletin joined Design Bureau No. 1,
code
named KB
1, to direct the Berkut (Golden
Eagle) air
defense project. That year a meeting of the
Defense Council chaired by J. Stalin concluded that
Moscow was defenseless against possible air attacks of
the potential enemy, particularly from the west, north

west, and north. To rectify this, the decision was made
to build an air
defense system for the entire Moscow
industrial region. Stalin stressed that the air defense
must be perfectly impenetrable, considering the threat
of atomic bombing.
To the Soviet government, the Berkut project was as
important as the creation of nuclear ballistic missiles
[8]. Raspletin took responsibility for its radio
engi

neering side as a deputy to its chief designers
P.N. Kuksenko and S.L. Beria, Jr. (son of L.P. Beria).
In fact, he made decisions about the configuration of
the entire system, as well as of its radar facilities. It was
Raspletin who advanced the unprecedented concept
of a multichannel radar station capable of tracking up
to 20 targets concurrently within a fixed coverage sec

tor. The facility was named the B
200 Central Guid

ance Radar.
In addition, Raspletin and A.P. Reutov proposed
providing the Berkut system with an early
warning
and missile
targeting capability in the form of Tu
4
aircraft equipped with a long
range radar and radio

homing air
to
air missiles for defense, the latter being
previously designed by SB
1. The proposal was sup

ported by the leading airborne
radar designer
V.V. Tikhomirov, and was approved by Kuksenko and
Stalin in 1951. The aircraft was code
named D
500.
The Berkut system began to be tested as early as
1952, with Raspletin as the resident technical supervi

sor at the test range.
In November 1952, a simulation was successfully
conducted of firing a V
300 surface
to
air missile
(SAM) at a target under closed
loop guidance. The
first target drone was shot down on April 26, 1953, and
the first phase of test firings was finished the next
month, the tests involving Tu
4 aircraft.
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497

SNAR
1 radar station in transit.

In the middle of 1953, Raspletin succeeded

S.L. Beria, Jr., as chief designer, and the Berkut system
was renamed the S
25.
The final series of ground tests of a full
fledged pro

totype that guided missiles to 20 targets concurrently
were conducted in 1954 and 1955. The same years saw
the deployment of actual S
25 facilities near Moscow,
which involved an enormous amount of construction
work. On May 7, 1955, a meeting chaired by
N.S. Khrushchev declared S
25 accepted. Raspletin
was given the title of Hero of Socialist Labor and was
presented with a ZIM luxury car.
However, S
25 had the obvious disadvantage of
being immobile, and as such could not be used to
defend the cities and other critical assets of the coun

try. Continual violations of the Soviet airspace made
the need for nationwide air defense more pressing.
Considering the circumstances, Raspletin came for

ward with an initiative to design a mobile SAM system,
which was given the code name S
75 [9].
The work on S
75 began when the S
25 project was
still in progress. The acceptance tests of S
75 in a ten

tative frequency band were finished as early as 1957,
and its final version entered service the next year. Ras

pletin was awarded the Lenin Prize in recognition of

Central Guidance Radar of the S
25 system.

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ASHURBEILI et al.
(a)

(b)

U
2 Affair: (a) A U
2 spy aircraft in flight and (b) the government commission examining the wreckage of the U
2 downed on
May 1, 1960.

his leading part in the effort. In 1958 he was elected a

corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sci

ences, and was named to the Supreme Soviet of the
National Economy (Vesenkha), chaired by V.M. Rya

bikov. In January 1961, Raspletin was appointed gen

eral designer of KB
1.
S
75 became famous when a U
2 spy aircraft
crossed the border and was shot down near Sverdlovsk
(now Yekaterinburg) on May Day in 1960. The same
day, D.F. Ustinov called a meeting in the Kremlin to
discuss the event. Raspletin, who had just talked with
the air
defense commander
in
chief, pointed to the
urgent need for an integrated automated system for
command and control of all air
defense facilities. The
project to implement his proposal was named Elektron
(Electron).
In the spring of 1958, Raspletin formulated the task
of creating an air
defense system with an increased
range of operation compared with S
75 and the next
mobile SAM system, S
125 [10]. The rationale was the
emergence of aircraft with a long
range jamming
capability and air
to
surface missiles with a range
exceeding 100 km; indeed, radars of increased cover

age were more suitable for a country with a vast terri

tory. The conceptual design of the long
range SAM
system, code
named S
200, was finished in May 1959;
the preliminary design was performed during Decem

ber 1959 and January 1960; and the ground tests
started in 1966. The same year saw the beginning of
work on its successor, S
300.
Raspletin also directed missile
defense projects. In
1953, seven marshals wrote a letter to the Central
Committee of the Communist Party, alerting it to the
emerging threat from long
range ballistic missiles. It

contained the following points: In the immediate

future, we expect to see the potential enemy deploying
long
range ballistic missiles as the main vehicle to
deliver nuclear devices to the critical assets of our coun

try. However, our air
defense facilities, whether in ser

vice or in development, are incapable of combating the
missiles. We are writing to request that branch ministries
be ordered to launch projects with the aim of creating
facilities to combat the ballistic missiles. On October 28,
the Council of Ministers issued the order On the Fea

sibility of Creating Missile
Defense Facilities, followed
by the December order On the Development of Tech

niques for Combating Long
Range Missiles. An appro

priate unit was set up in KB
1 in response to the
request by senior military officials that leading experts
of the design bureau took part in the missile
defense
effort. During 1955 and 1956, the government made
decisions to proceed with the feasibility study.
KB
1 was selected as the leading designer of a local
missile
defense system, named Azov, and Raspletin
was put in charge of the project. In 1965, KB
1 pro

duced a preliminary design and proceeded to prepare
technical documentation. Later, the design bureau
was ordered to upgrade the system for use of intercon

tinental ballistic missiles for missile
defense purposes.
The Azov system was conceived by Raspletin as an
integral part of a wider effort that included the cre

ation of a missile
defense system for Moscow (A
35)
and a space
based warning system designed to detect
missile firings. In 1965, KB
1 was charged with con

ducting a feasibility study on such a warning system,
following a request by the air
defense command. Its

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A TITAN OF RADIO ENGINEERING

concept was framed by Research Institute No. 2 of the

Ministry of Defense, with a significant contribution
made by Raspletin.
As regards air defense, Raspletin put forward the
innovative idea of using laser radiation against low
fly

ing targets. It was supported by B.V. Bunkin,
F.V. Bunkin, and E.P. Velikhov, who estimated the out

put laser energy required to shoot down an aircraft at
2 107 J (subject to air attenuation) against an avail

able input energy of 6 108 J.
Raspletin assigned his deputy B.V. Bunkin to lead
the laser project, who set up a targeted laboratory in
February 1966, with E.M. Sukharev as its head.
Velikhov was charged by the Academys Vice President
M.D. Millionshchikov with related investigations into
magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) generators. A pro

gram was formulated under Raspletins supervision
that addressed the design of a system for the precision
guidance of a laser beam. Later, it provided the basis
for a lidar project.
In the summer of 1966, Raspletin, Velikhov,
B.V. Bunkin, F.V. Bunkin, and P.P. Pashinin met at the
Lebedev Physical Institute to discuss the laser project
and decided to prepare a note for the Central Com

mittee of the Communist Party. The document was
ready by the autumn, entitled Proposals for a Broadly
Based Investigation into Resources and Methods for
Building Systems around Optical Quantum Genera

tors. The Central Committee and the Council of
Ministers approved the initiative in their joint decree
of February 23, 1967. Raspletin, A.M. Prokhorov,
B.V. Bunkin, and Velikhov were appointed the chief
researchers of the project.
Regrettably, Raspletin died suddenly on March 8,
1967, after a brief illness in his 59th year.
Any account of Raspletins career is seriously
incomplete if it omits his academic work. It was before
he graduated from the Leningrad Electrotechnical
Institute that he began teaching a daytime course in
TV
set design for fourth
year students. After he quali

fied as a radio engineer, he taught there for some time
and then at a retraining college, while lecturing at the
Leningrad Radio
Amateur Club. On March 7, 1947,
he defended his dissertation On the Design of a Sin

gle
Valve Sawtooth Oscillator to obtain a candidates
degree in engineering. In the middle of 1949, he began
lecturing on automatic control and teleoperation at
the Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School. After
joining KB
1, he originated the idea of a resident radar
department of the Moscow Institute of Physics and
Technology on the premises of the design bureau, and
this was established in 1954. In 1956 Raspletin was
cumulatively awarded a doctoral degree.
But the most important product of Raspletins aca

demic and mentoring activities was his school of
researchers and engineers including B.V. Bunkin,
HERALD OF THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

499

G.Ya. Guskov, V.I. Markov, P.M. Kirillov, A.E. Basis

tov, A.I. Savin, G.V. Kisunko, Yu.N. Figurovskii,
K.S. Alperovich, V.P. Shishov, V.M. Shabanov,
E.M. Sukharev, V.G. Repin, V.M. Sidorin, and
A.P. Reutov. He advised more than 40 graduate stu

dents.
For many years, Raspletin served as a member of
the expert council of the Higher Attestation Commis

sion and a member of the Special Committee at the
Council of Ministers. He chaired the technical board
at KB
1.
In 1956, Raspletin was awarded a doctoral degree
in recognition of his achievements in radio engineer

ing. In 1958 and 1964, he was elected a corresponding
member and a full member, respectively, of the USSR
Academy of Sciences in the field of radio and elec

tronic engineering.
Raspletin belonged to a new generation of engi

neers. Those who knew him personally remember his
clear
sightedness; extensive expertise in matters of sci

ence, engineering, and manufacturing; enthusiasm
balanced with sound judgment; equal attention to the

oretical and practical aspects; resourcefulness; and
amazing capacity for hard work. In his professional
relationships, he strove for exacting standards while
being approachable and cheerful. Intensely patriotic,
he made invaluable contributions to the national sci

ence, technology, and defense [11]. Four decades after
his death, we admire him even more.
I.R. Ashurbeili,
Cand. Sci. (Eng.),
A.P. Reutov,
RAS Corresponding Member,
E.M. Sukharev,
Dr. Sci. (Eng.)
REFERENCES
1. V. I. Garnov, Academician Aleksandr Raspletin (Mosk

ovskii Rabochii, Moscow, 1990) [in Russian].
2. A.A. Raspletin and His Place in the Russian Radio Ham
Movement in the 1930 and1940s: A Report by the OAO
GSKB AlmazAntei, the MilitaryHistorical Museum of
Artillery, Engineering and Signal Corps, and the Budenny
Military Academy of Communications of the Russian
Ministry of Defense (Moscow, 2008) [in Russian].
3. E. S. Makushin and A. A. Raspletin, Standard of Fre

quency of the Central Radiolaboratory of the All

Union Low
Current Union, Tekh. Radio Slabogo
Toka, No. 10 (1932).
4. E. M. Sukharev, The Role of A.A. Raspletin in the
History of Development of the First Russian Television
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ASHURBEILI et al.
Receivers, Elektrosvyaz: Istoriya Sovremennost,
No. 1 (2008).

5. E. M. Sukharev, A.A. Raspletin and Television Meth

ods of Reflection of the Air Situation, Elektrosvyaz:
Istoriya Sovremennost, No. 2 (2008).
6. E. M. Sukharev, The Participation of A.A. Raspletin in
the Development and Implementation of Black
and

White Television Standards, Zh. 625, No. 7 (2008).
7. Standard 625: World Recognition, Zh. 625, (Spe

cial ed.) (2008).

8. K. S. Alperovich, Years of Work over the Moscow Air

Defense System: 19501955 (Engineers Notes), 2nd.
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9. Sixty Years of NPO Almaz: Victories and Prospects:
A Collective Monograph (Uniserv, Moscow, 2007) [in
Russian].
10. A. V. Ryazanov and E. M. Sukharev, Aircraft and
Rocket Complexes and Air Defense Systems, in
Dynamism of Radio Electronics (Moscow, 2007).
11. I. R. Ashurbeili, Geopolitical Aspects of A.A. Rasple

tins Scientific and Engineering Activity, Rossiya,
Sept., 11 (2008).

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