Sergei Korolev - Imprisonment

Imprisonment

On 22 June 1938, during the Great Purge, Korolev was arrested by the NKVD after being denounced by Ivan Kleymenov, Georgy Langemak, and Valentin Glushko. He was accused of deliberately slowing the work of the research institute, and following torture in the Lubyanka prison to extract a confession, was tried and sentenced to ten years in a labor camp. Korolev later learned that he had been denounced by Glushko, and this may have been the cause of the lifelong animosity between the two men. Glushko and Korolev had reportedly been denounced by Andrei Kostikov, who became the head of RNII after its leadership was arrested (Kostikov was ousted a few years later over accusations of budget irregularities).

Believing that his arrest was a mistake, Korolev wrote many appeals to the authorities, including Stalin himself. Following the fall of the NKVD head, Nikolai Yezhov, the new chief Lavrenti Beria chose to retry Korolev on reduced charges in 1939, but by that time Korolev was on his way from prison to a gulag camp in the far east of Siberia, where he spent several months in a gold mine in the Kolyma area before word reached him of his retrial. Towards the end of 1939 he was sent back to Moscow, but he had already sustained injuries and had lost most of his teeth due to the labor camp's brutal conditions. When he reached Moscow, Korolev's sentence was reduced to eight years, which he did not have to serve in a labor camp.

Other members of the RNII had also been arrested. Kleymenov and Langemak were executed, leaving Korolev very fortunate to have even survived. The rocket program was set back for years and fell far behind the rapid progress taking place in Germany.

Korolev was assigned to a "sharashka", a penitentiary for intellectuals and the educated. These were effectively slave-labor camps where scientists and engineers worked on projects assigned by the Communist party leadership. The Central Design Bureau 29 (CKB-29, ЦКБ-29) of the NKVD, served as Tupolev's engineering facility, and Korolev was brought here to work for his old mentor. During World War II, this sharashka designed both the Tupolev Tu-2 bomber and the Petlyakov Pe-2 dive bomber. The group was moved several times during the war, the first time to avoid capture by advancing German forces.

In 1942 Korolev managed to be moved to another "sharashka" under Valentin Glushko, which designed rocket-assisted take off boosters for aircraft. Korolev was kept in the sharashka and isolated from his family until 1944. He lived under constant fear of being executed for the military secrets he possessed, and was deeply affected by his time in the gulag, becoming reserved and cautious. On 27 June 1944, Korolev – along with Tupolev, Glushko and others – was finally discharged by special government decree, although the charges against him were not dropped until 1957. The design bureau was handed over from NKVD control to the government's aviation industry commission. Korolev continued working with the bureau for another year, serving as deputy designer under Glushko and studying various rocket designs. In 1944, Korolev and Glushko designed the RD-1 kHz auxiliary rocket motor tested in an unsuccessful fast-climb Lavochkin La-7R.