Short answers, pulled from the story.
Oleg Vladimirovich Losev was a Russian and Soviet scientist born on the 10th of May 1903 in Tver, Russia. He invented the light-emitting diode (LED), built the first solid-state amplifiers and oscillators, and constructed the first solid-state radio receivers, all without completing a formal university education or holding a position higher than technician.
Losev observed light emission from a silicon carbide point-contact junction around 1924 while working at the Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory. He published his detailed findings in a Russian journal in 1927 and continued publishing research on the LED between 1924 and 1941.
Losev died of starvation on the 22nd of January 1942, at age 38, during the Siege of Leningrad when German forces blockaded the city in World War 2. His place of burial is not known.
Losev's semiconductor research was overshadowed by the dominant success of vacuum tube technology, and Soviet authorities did not support his work. The zincite crystals he needed for solid-state devices had to be imported from the United States, limiting his progress. His discoveries were not broadly recognized until the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Crystodyne was the name given by Hugo Gernsback to Losev's negative resistance semiconductor technology. Losev used biased zincite crystals to build solid-state amplifiers, oscillators, and radio receivers operating at frequencies up to 5 MHz, achieving this 25 years before the invention of the transistor.
Nikolay Zheludev published a formal credit to Losev for inventing the LED in the April 2007 issue of Nature Photonics. An earlier 1951 paper by Kurt Lehovec in Physical Review had cited Losev's work, though his name appeared there as Lossew.