Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory

(full name, V. I. Lenin Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory; NRL), the first Soviet scientific research center for radio engineering. The laboratory was founded in August 1918, and its beginnings were closely associated with V. I. Lenin, who edited and, on Dec. 2, 1918, signed the Regulations of the Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory, With the Shop of the People’s Commissariat of Post and Telegraph. Subsequently Lenin monitored the laboratory’s work closely and helped it in every way.

The first director of the NRL was V. M. Leshchinskii, and the leading scientists and organizers were M. A. Bonch-Bruevich, V. K. Lebedinskii, P. A. Ostriakov, V. V. Tatarinov, V. P. Vologdin, and A. F. Shorin. In March 1919 the NRL began production of receiver-amplifier electron tubes, in the fall of 1920 it installed a 5-kilowatt (kW) radiotelephone transmitter at the Khodynka radio station in Moscow, and in 1922 it installed a 12-kW transmitter at the same station, which was then named the Comintern Central Radiotelephone Station.

The NRL developed transmitter tubes with a power of up to 0.3 kW (1923) and was the first to make transmitter tubes with a water-cooled plate with a power of 25 kW (1923) and 100 kW (1925–26). In 1926 it built a 40-kW transmitter for the Moscow radio station at Shabolovka (Novyi Komintern). For regional radio broadcasting, the NRL developed a low-cost general-purpose transmitter with a power of 1.2 kW; by 1928 such transmitters had been installed at radio stations in 25 cities of the USSR. From 1924 to 1927, using directional radiation, the NRL achieved intercontinental radio communication and communication with the antipodes by means of short waves; it also had set up round-the-clock communications on the Moscow-Tashkent circuit. The NRL was awarded two Orders of the Red Banner of Labor (1922 and 1928). In 1924 the name of V. I. Lenin was conferred on it. In 1928 the NRL became part of the Leningrad Central Radio Laboratory of the Weak-current Plant Trust.