Vladimir Kuzmin, Polivoks creator, dies at 84

Vladimir Kuzmin, the engineer behind the Formanta Polivoks, died at 84, closing a line of Soviet synthesizer history that still sounds startlingly present. Elta Music, which had worked with Kuzmin on Polivoks-inspired designs, announced the news on June 12, and the response in synth circles centered on one fact: the Polivoks was never just an oddity from behind the Iron Curtain. It became a reference point for a raw, unstable analog sound that players, builders, and restorers still chase.

The Formanta Radio Factory produced the Polivoks in the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1990, and an oft-cited interview puts total output at about 25,000 units. That scarcity is part of its hold on collectors, but the instrument’s appeal runs deeper than rarity. Kuzmin engineered the synth, while his wife, Olimpiada Kuzmina, shaped its industrial design, giving it the tank-like presence that made it instantly recognizable. The machine was intended not only for music performance but also for cinema and studio sound effects, which helps explain why it occupies a strange and valuable place in synth history: part instrument, part tool, part Soviet design object.

What made the Polivoks unforgettable was not just its origin story. Technical descriptions have long singled out its unusual comparator-based filter, including its distinctive low-pass and band-pass behavior, as a major source of the synth’s abrasive character. That circuit choice gave the instrument a voice that sits somewhere between unruly and muscular, and it is exactly why modern builders keep returning to it. In 2021, MusicRadar reported that Behringer was working with Kuzmin on a new synth project tied to the Polivoks legacy. By 2026, Elta Music was developing the Polivoks-8, an eight-voice analog synthesizer inspired by the original design, while Erica Synths and other builders continued to draw on the same sonic template.

For owners and restorers, Kuzmin’s death sharpens the value of what survives: original Polivoks units, the documentation that explains their circuit logic, and the accumulated knowledge needed to keep them alive. Each working example still carries the split authorship of Vladimir and Olimpiada Kuzmina, and each modern clone or module that borrows from the design keeps that Soviet lineage active. The Polivoks remains prized because it still behaves like itself, and now the community is left preserving the machines, notes, and ideas that made it so singular in the first place.