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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
From aviation engineer to rocket research organiser: the academy, Berlin and the GDL
Kleymenov was born on 30 March (11 April) 1899 into a landless peasant family in Staraya Surava, Tambov province. He finished three years of the Degtyansk parish school, entered the fourth class of the Morshansk district men's gymnasium in 1913 and graduated in 1918. In 1918 he joined the Red Army and entered the artillery section of the First Moscow Soviet courses, volunteering for the front that same year with his whole course; he served at the headquarters of the 3rd Army of the Eastern Front and became a party member in 1919. In April 1919 he was detached for study at agitators' courses, and from August 1919 to May 1920 he completed an accelerated course at the Red Army Military Economic Academy, after which he served as a supply plenipotentiary of the 14th Army of the South-Western Front.
In early 1921 he entered the mathematics section of the physics and mathematics faculty of Moscow State University, though his studies had to be combined with work at the People's Commissariat of Foreign Trade. In 1923 a Moscow city party committee assignment moved him to the engineering faculty of the N. E. Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, and after graduating in 1928 with the rank of military mechanical engineer of the air fleet he was appointed head of the workshops of the Red Army Air Force research institute. Recognised for his command of German and his foreign trade experience, he was posted to the engineering department of the trade delegation in Berlin, where he worked as a senior engineer and was promoted to deputy head of the department, travelling on its business to other German cities and to various European countries.
Accounts differ on whether he went to Berlin immediately after graduating in 1928 or was posted there in 1929. The record becomes clearer for the institute period. In 1931 M. N. Tukhachevsky developed the idea of concentrating rocket technology and a fundamentally new type of weapon in one organisation, and in May 1932, after returning to Moscow, Kleymenov accepted the offer of the head of the Red Army Artillery Directorate, N. A. Yefimov, to take charge of the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, with the prospect of building it into a full institute. His taking up of the post is recorded as December 1932. At the GDL he joined V. A. Artemyev and G. E. Langemak in developing smokeless-powder rocket projectiles for aircraft and multi-barrelled mortars, remaining its head until September 1933, when the laboratory was folded into a new Moscow institute that unified rocket research and he became its head.