Nikolai had studied law at St. Petersburg University, but was expelled after the assassination of Alexander II for his ties to revolutionaries despite not being involved in their actions.

Tupolev's mother, Anna Vasilievna (née Lisitsyna) (1850-1928) was born in Torzhok in the family of a judicial investigator, and graduated from the Mariinsky Gymnasium in Tver.

By 1920, the IMTU had been renamed the Moscow Higher Technical School (MVTU) and Tupolev was teaching a course there on the basics of aerodynamic calculations.

[5] Tupolev was a leading figure of the Moscow-based Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI; Russian: Центральный аэро-гидродинамический институт; ЦАГИ) from 1929 until his death in 1972.

However, on 21 October 1937, Tupolev was arrested together with Vladimir Petlyakov and the entire directorate of the TsAGI and EDO during the Great Purge on trumped up charges of sabotage, espionage and of aiding the Russian Fascist Party.

Tupolev headed the B-4 project, as it was initially designated, to reverse engineer the American Boeing B-29 Superfortress strategic bomber, which had been the first aircraft to deliver a nuclear weapon.

Tupolev succeeded in the complex task of re-engineering the design with Soviet engines, weapons, equipment and airfoil sections, while using available metric sheetmetal which required a nearly complete redesign as the original had been built to imperial measurements, while new alloys also had to be brought into production.

Tupolev's own design for the role had been ignored in the interest of getting the new long range bomber into service as rapidly as possible to respond to the multiple illegal American overflights, mostly with Martin PBM-5 Mariners that had already begun, and the overt threat of nuclear attack.

After Khruschev's removal from office in late 1964 and the rise of Leonid Brezhnev, the ageing Tupolev gradually lost positions at the centres of Soviet power to rivals in the aircraft industry.

To his contemporaries, Tupolev was known as a witty but crude master of obscene vocabulary who invariably and energetically insisted on fast and adequate technical fixes at the expense of scholastic ideal solutions.

A hallmark of Tupolev was to get an aeroplane into service very rapidly, then began an often interminable process of improving the shortcomings of the "quick and dirty" initial design.

Various streets in cities across the Eastern Bloc were named in honour of Tupolev, as well as one in Western Europe, the Tupolevlaan near Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.

Another memorial to Tupolev was erected in the estimated location of Pustomazovo in the present-day Ustinovo, north of Kimry in Kimrsky District, Tver Oblast.

The 1979 biographical film Poema o kryl'yakh (Поэма о крыльях) directed by Daniil Khrabrovitsky is about the life and works of Tupolev and Igor Sikorsky, the Russian-American aviation pioneer.