Editing Leon Theremin (section)

==World War I and Russian Civil War==
Although only in his second academic year, the deanery of the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy recommended that Theremin go to the Nikolayevska Military Engineering School in [[Petrograd]] (previously Saint Petersburg), which usually only accepted students in their fourth year. Theremin recalled that Ioffe reassured him that the war would not last long and that military experience would be useful for scientific applications.<ref name="ima53">{{cite web |author=L. S. Termen |year=1970 |title=Der erste Weltkrieg |url=http://www.ima.or.at/theremin/?page_id=53&cat=1 |work=Erinnerungen an A.&nbsp;F.&nbsp;Joffe |language=de |access-date=2009-04-25 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090511013521/http://www.ima.or.at/theremin/?page_id=53&cat=1 |archive-date=2009-05-11 }}</ref>

Beginning his military service in 1916, Theremin finished the Military Engineering School in six months, progressed through the Graduate Electronic School for Officers, and attained the military radio-engineer diploma in the same year.{{citation needed|date=May 2012}} In the course of the next three and a half years he oversaw the construction of a radio station in [[Saratov]] to connect the Volga area with Moscow, graduated from Petrograd University, became deputy leader of the new Military Radiotechnical Laboratory in Moscow, and finished as the broadcast supervisor of the radio transmitter at ''[[Tsarskoye Selo]]'' near Petrograd (then renamed ''Detskoye Selo'').<ref name="ima53"/>

During the [[Russian Civil War]], in October 1919 [[White movement|White Army]] commander [[Nikolai Nikolayevich Yudenich]] advanced on Petrograd from the side of ''Detskoye Selo'', apparently intending to capture the radio station to announce a victory over the Bolsheviks. Theremin and others evacuated the station, sending equipment east on rail cars. Theremin then detonated explosives to destroy the 120-meter-high antenna mast before traveling to Petrograd to set up an international listening station. There he also trained radio specialists but reported difficulties obtaining food and working with foreign experts whom he described as narrow-minded pessimists.<ref name="ima52">{{cite web |author=L. S. Termen |year=1970 |title=Die Evakuierung der Radiostation |url=http://www.ima.or.at/theremin/?page_id=52&cat=1 |work=Erinnerungen an A.&nbsp;F.&nbsp;Joffe |language=de |access-date=2009-04-25 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090511013516/http://www.ima.or.at/theremin/?page_id=52&cat=1 |archive-date=2009-05-11 }}</ref>

Theremin recalled that on an evening when his hopes of overcoming these obstructing experts reached a low ebb, Abram Fedorovich Ioffe telephoned him.<ref name="ima51"/> Ioffe asked Theremin to come to his newly founded [[Ioffe Institute|Physical Technical Institute]] in Petrograd, and the next day he invited him to start work at developing measuring methods for high-frequency electrical oscillations.<ref name="ima51">{{cite web |author=L. S. Termen |year=1970 |title=Die Physikalisch Technische Hochschule unter der Leitung von Joffe |url=http://www.ima.or.at/theremin/?page_id=51&cat=1 |work=Erinnerungen an A.&nbsp;F.&nbsp;Joffe |language=de |access-date=2009-04-25 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090511013511/http://www.ima.or.at/theremin/?page_id=51&cat=1 |archive-date=2009-05-11 }}</ref>