3 Roubles OKB Tupolev

Issued as part of the Bank of Russia's long-running series honoring Soviet and Russian defense industry enterprises, this piece commemorates the Tupolev Design Bureau — OKB-156 — founded by Andrei Tupolev in 1922, the same year the Soviet aviation industry was being centralized under the newly formed Aviakhim trust. Tupolev himself spent nearly three years in a Sharashka, a NKVD prison research facility, designing the Tu-2 bomber under arrest before his formal rehabilitation in 1944.