The organiser who turned rocket research into a state institution
On 2 November 1937, Kleymenov was arrested after the detention of Georgy Langemak, the institute's chief engineer.
Ivan Kleymenov was a military engineer and administrator who organised the Soviet Union's early rocket work. Linking the Gas Dynamics Laboratory with the Reactive Scientific Research Institute, he helped bring research into the defence system and supported solid-propellant rockets that fed into the later Katyusha programme. The institution he built was then shattered by the Great Purge, which arrested its leading specialists and ended with Kleymenov's execution. He was fully rehabilitated in 1955 and posthumously named a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1991.
Career Timeline
- 1919Joined the RCP(b)
- 1920–1921Served in Red Army military supply administration
- 1928–1930Headed workshops at the Air Force Research Institute
- 1930–1932Deputy head of the engineering section, Soviet Trade Mission in Berlin
- 1932–1933Head of the Gas Dynamics Laboratory
- 1933–1937First head and director of the Reactive Scientific Research Institute
- 1937Deputy head of the propeller-and-engine section at TsAGI
- 1938Executed; rehabilitated for lack of a criminal case in 1955