Alexander Alexandrovich Terentyev

Alexander Alexandrovich Terentyev is an invisible man. The Severnoye Design Bureau was the Soviet Union's leading designer of combatant surface ships of all major classes. By some accounts A.A.Terentiev was seemingly the leader of this Bureau for much of the Cold War. Then he vanished. There are no photographs of him, nor even the briefest of biographies. And some histories of Severnoye do not mention him at all.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s when the West was stunned by the space accomplishments of the Soviet Union, the identity of their "Chief Designer" was a state secret in keeping with the tradition of Russian national secrecy. It was not until his death at age 59 that the name of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was revealed to the world for posthumous honor. The man himself had remained something of a mystery until his death, as his identity was a state secret.

Soviet Communist Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev famously noted in 1958 that: “When the time comes photographs and the names of these glorious people will be published and they will become broadly known among the people. We value and respect these people highly and assure their security from enemy agents who might be sent to destroy these outstanding people, our valuable cadres. But now, in order to guarantee the security of the country and the lives of these scholars, engineers, technicians, and other specialists, we cannot make their names public or print their pictures.”

The attribute of invisibility is one which is shared by gods, spirits, demons, the dead and the region of the dead, or the world of the gods, while the power of becoming invisible belongs to those beings as well as to certain mortals. Where invisibility was ascribed to gods or spirits, one simple reason probably was that in the case of most of them, apart from animal-gods or worshipful parts of nature, they were in fact unseen. When man begins to people his world with spirits, which, as many savages believe, swarm everywhere, so that one cannot move without striking against them, their quality of invisibility is obvious.

In the case of favored mortals, the supposed power of invisibility was ascribed to or claimed by them because it was a desirable thing. What men wish for is often what they think they or others possess. Such a supposed power might easily then be reflected back upon supernatural beings, otherwise material and visible.

The gods of Babylon 'constituted a countless multitude of visible and invisible beings, their bodies of a more raretied substance than that of mortals. The hosts of demons were invisible and impalpable, though possessed of some form, and could creep into houses through the narrowest possible openings. In Greece the gods had powers of invisibility or they could surround themselves with a mist, but they could also make themselves visible to mortals in various forms. They would also enshroud their favorites in darkness or a mist to save them in time of danger. Early Hindu literature shows that the gods were invisible, yet could assume any visible form at will to favored worshippers.

Plato told a story of the Ring of Gyges in Republic, Book II. According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia. There was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he saw a dead body of stature, he took a gold ring from the finger of the dead and reascended. When he put the ring on, he became invisible. He contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; where as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom.

In J.R.R.Tolkien's Ring trilogy, the One Ring was an ancient artefact created by the Dark Lord Sauron in the Second Age for the purpose of ruling over the Free peoples of Middle-earth, mainly the Elves. The One Ring shifts its wearer to the "wraith-world", in which the wearer could see the forms of other persons. While the wearer would seem invisible, in reality, they would be visible to the creatures of the Unseen realm. Tolkien scholar John D. Rateliff considered five different rings of invisibility which occur in works that predate Tolkien's: Plato's Ring of Gyges (ca. 390 BC), the magic ring in Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, the Knight of the Lion (ca. 1177); Angelica's ring, of French Renaissance literature; the Fairy's ring in the "The Enchanted Ring" (by François Fénelon) in Andrew Lang's The Green Fairy Book (a collection of fairy-tales referred to by Tolkien in his Andrew Lang lecture); the witch-maiden's ring in an Estonian folktale (ca. 1866) from the Kalevipoeg, translated as "The Dragon of the North" in The Yellow Fairy Book (1894).

In the Harry Potter fiction, the Cloak of Invisibility is a magical artefact used to render the wearer invisible. Dumbledore gave Harry Potter the Cloak of Invisibility as a Christmas present anonymously and told him to "use it well." In Greek myth there were stories of the way the gods used to throw about the favored mortal whom they wished to protect a magic cloak of invisibility. One moment a man was standing in plain sight of all; the next moment, after he had slipped this cloak over his shoulders, it was to those who looked on as if he were not there. He was there, but he was saved from any danger of attack because he could not be seen and located.

A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue. "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me."

"The Invisible Man" is a science fiction classic published in 1897 – and a penetrating, unflinching look into the heart of human nature. To its author, H. G. Wells, the novel was as compelling as “a good gripping dream.” The Invisible Man sees himself as a free individual no longer bound by the dictates of society. In the end, a bunch of people gang up on the Invisible Man and kill him. As he dies, he loses his invisibility and reader get a first glimpse of the Visible Man.

The “culture of secrecy” is actually a perfect characterization of the old Soviet Union’s attitude toward information. Some elements of this “system” were inherited from Tsarist Russia. The restrictions became especially severe during the 1930s, under Stalin’s rule. The “culture of secrecy” provided advantages not only for Stalin personally but also for the Soviet regime as a whole. Although the USSR under Stalin was essentially a one-man dictatorship, the Communist Party Politburo and the broader (and therefore less useful as an instrument of power) Central Committee became Stalin-dominated institutions that helped him run the country and retain absolute power.

The Soviet regime developed the culture of secrecy to the point of absurdity, as illustrated by the following anecdote: The library of the Mikoyan Design Bureau, which produced MIG fighter planes, received an American aviation magazine that all employees of the Bureau were permitted to read. One day an issue arrived carrying a story about the people who had designed the MIG aircraft. The article contained a small map that showed the area in Moscow where the Design Bureau was located. Each of the structures in this area, including all of the Bureau’s buildings, were labeled, as was a photo of the Bureau’s main entrance.

Design Bureau employees had previously been told that the Bureau’s exact location was a military secret. Many of them guffawed when they saw that this “secret” information was readily available to the American public. Senior officials ordered that this issue of the magazine be moved immediately to the Bureau library’s spetskhran (a secure room or section with restricted access, in which designated persons could read foreign material on issues deemed “sensitive” by Soviet authorities.)

The first head of the Northern Bureau was Yuri Gavrilovich Derevyanko. He led the Northern PKB when he was at TsKB-53 - from 1946 to 1951. There was the first chief engineer and chief designer Vladimir Aleksandrovich Nikitin. His works are still used in the production process. This person is a famous person in the field. Other prominent personalities also played an outstanding role in the development and development of the bureau. These include Jacob Fedorovich Orest, Vasily Gavrilovich Korolevich, Arved Fyder, Nikolai Pavlovich Sobolev, Evgeny Ivanovich Tretnikov, Boris Izrailevich Kupensky Igor I. Rubis, Alexey Ivanovich Taptygin, Alexander Konstantinovich Shnyrov, V.A. Perevalov, chief engineer and chief designer Vasily Fedorovich Anikiev, V.P. Mishin, and chief engineer Alexander Alexandrovich Terentyev ; Hero of socialist labor, chief engineer and chief designer, head of the bureau from 1958 to 1979 [other sources report his dates from 1975 to 1993], and Vladimir Ilyich Spiridopulo - since 1993.