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A prominent Soviet aircraft designer. Since 1922, the design bureau which he founded
and that now bears his name has built more than 100 different military and civilian
aircraft, including the workhorse of the Aeroflot fleet, the Tu-154. In one of
the more bizarre stories of the Great Purges, Stalin had the entire Tupolev design
bureau arrested as "enemies of the people" in 1938. Nothing changed in their work,
except that they were now all prisoners in the Gulag and that Tupolev’s name was
not mentioned in public until his release in 1943.
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