Re: Why no mention of Sergei Korolev?
There was a fantastic Equinox documentary called "Russian Rockets, the Engines that came in from the Cold" back in 2001 on the NK-33 engine, which up until the fall of the Soviet Union was unknown in the west. And then the impoverished rocket scientists came knocking on various doors in the west to try and sell their engine, which was promising a seemingly impossible thrust-to-weight ratio of almost double anything the west could produce.
The best part of the documentary is the expressions of astonishment on the face of the western engineers when they saw one demonstrated, and the absolute disbelief when the scientists said they had over a hundred of them in a warehouse back home. It turned out that while the rocket the engine was originally for was cancelled by the Kremlin, and the program was supposedly shut down, Korolev and his team just carried on refining the techniques and produced what turns out to be the finest LOX/Kerosene engine ever made.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33