[5][6][2] After his discharge from the Red Army in 1927, he worked as a driver at a depot near Moscow[2] He graduated from Bauman Moscow State Technical University in 1934 and began working at the Kuybyshev Locomotive Factory, where he moved from designer to director in under five years.

[7][3][2] Instead, he was assigned to the People's Commissariat of Medium Engineering, later identified by the American intelligence as lead agency overseeing the Soviet program of nuclear weapons.

[2][3] He had jokingly been called the "Prince of Tankograd" for a number of years because of the engineering progress he made.

[2][5] After Stalin's death in 1953, Malyshev's job titles changed several times and was suspected to have become the Chief of the Soviet Atomic Energy Commission after for a period.

[16] In the mid-1950s, he headed a committee to investigate the explosion that destroyed the Novorossiysk, an Italian battleship the Soviets commandeered after World War II despite Malyshev's attempts to convince Stalin not to take it on in 1946.

[17] This was used as an excuse to prevent Nikolai Kuznetsov, who opposed Nikita Khrushchev's idea of a submarine-based navy, from commanding the Red Fleet and replace him with Sergey Gorshkov, who was much more obedient to the premier's wishes.

[19] The New York Times reported his cause of death as leukemia[15][20] but he ultimately died of acute radiation syndrome after inspecting a Soviet nuclear plant before it was safe to do so.