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
Korolev is the father of the Soviet rocket program, argubly its most important person, somewhat akin to von Braun in the USA. He’s a designer of R7, direct predecessor of Soyuz that is still flying people to space. You know the shape when the boosters/first stage of Soyuz disconnect from the central stage? It’s called Korolev’s cross to this day. It’s definitely named after the scientist. And anyway, russians didn’t have a king, they had a tzar.