I don’t speak russian, but I’ve studied it alittle, and I do know the word Korolev actually means “king”. But it’s impossible to understand russian when it isn’t pronounced right. The language is simply really mean on that. The stress is on the last syllable, meaning that it’s pronounced (ROUGHLY) more like “karalév”.

However, it seems weird that Russia would name it’s ridiculously, out-of-this-world powerful military vessel “king”, when they haven’t had a monarch (and when they did, it was an emperor) for about 90 years at the time. And it turns out that there was a soviet scientist who worked on their space program who was named Korolev. So I suppose it’s named after him?

Must’ve been awkward being named “King” in the Soviet Union