The "First All-Union Conference on Automatic Control," Moscow, December 1940

Classical control theory and automation, contrary to what the author considers widely believed, did not begin almost entirely in the USA and the UK in the World War II. In particular, a conference held in Moscow in late 1940, but little known outside Russia, included papers on and discussion of: the Nyquist criterion; operator methods; transient response; the use of the operator exp(-Tp) to model a time delay of T seconds; and the |z| < 0 criterion for the stability of a sampled-data system. The author discusses the content of the conference, its political context and its historical significance.