"Following the fall of the NKVD head, Nikolai Yezhov, the new chief Lavrenti Beria chose to retry Korolev on reduced charges in 1939, but by that time Korolev was on his way from prison to a gulag camp in the far east of Siberia, where he spent several months in a gold mine in the Kolyma area before word reached him of his retrial. Towards the end of 1939 he was sent back to Moscow, but he had already sustained injuries and had lost most of his teeth due to the labor camp's brutal conditions"

And I thought my life was hard!