This is a picture of the soviet union's most famous, most decorated, most respected aircraft designer of all time, Adrei Tupolev. he's the guy who reverse-engineered the B-29 but never quite got it right, especially the engines which were reported to be under-powered and prone to failure:
and a little except from his career:
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However, on October 21, 1937, Tupolev was arrested together with Vladimir Petlyakov and the entire directorate of the TsAGI and EDO on trumped up charges of sabotage, espionage and of aiding the Russian Fascist Party. Many of his colleagues were executed.
In 1939, Tupolev was moved from a prison to an NKVD sharashka for aircraft designers in Bolshevo near Moscow, where many ex-TsAGI people had already been sent to work. The sharashka soon moved to Moscow and was dubbed "Tupolevka" after its most eminent inmate. Tupolev was tried and convicted in 1940 with a ten-year sentence. During this time he developed the Tupolev Tu-2,[4] He was released in 1944 "to conduct important defence work." (He was not rehabilitated fully until two years after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953.)
Tupolev headed the major project of reverse engineering the American Boeing B-29 strategic bomber, which was the world's first nuclear delivery platform. The USSR had repeatedly asked unsuccessfully for lend-lease B-29s. Using three machines which landed in Siberia after bombing Japan in 1945.
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