Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov is freed by Stalin. Stalin’s NKVD had purged all senior officers in the force in 1937, including him. After being beaten into confessing and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in a Siberian gold mine, he was beaten several times, had his jaw broken, lost all his teeth, and suffered from several debilitating diseases. Meanwhile, his main competitor, Valentin Glushko, took advantage of the situation to denounce him. At the end of the war, Tupolev worked with Stalin to convince him of the valuable contribution Korloyev could make to rocketry for the USSR, and he was released in 1945.
