Stalin’s NKVD purges all senior officers, including Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov. He is beaten until he confesses and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in a Siberian gold mine. There, he is beaten several times, has a broken jaw, loses all his teeth, and suffers from several debilitating diseases. Meanwhile, his main competitor, Valentin Glushko, takes advantage of the situation to denounce him. At the end of the war, Tupolev works with Stalin to convince him of the valuable contribution Korolyov could make to rocketry for the USSR, and he is released in 1945.
