Robert Ludvigovich Bartini

Robert Ludvigovich Bartini (or Roberto Oros di Bartini) (14 May 1897 – 6 December 1974) was an Italian aircraft designer and scientist. Active mostly in the Soviet Union, he was called Barone Rosso because of his noble descent.

Bartini was born in Fiume, Austria-Hungary (now Rijeka, Croatia). He was the son of an unmarried 17-year-old girl. When the natural father of the child, a married man, refused to recognize the baby as his son, the young mother drowned herself. Her aunts and tutors, impoverished aristocrats originally from the city of Miskolc, North-East of Budapest, granted custody of the child to a peasant family.

Besides his family education, he graduated from gymnasium in 1915, was drafted and sent to officers' reserve school located in Besztercebánya (Banská Bystrica in present-day Slovakia). Upon graduation in 1916, Bartini was sent to the Russian-Austrian-Hungarian front where he was captured in June 1916. He attended flying school in 1921 and Politecnico di Milano in 1922. Bartini became a member of the Italian Communist Party in 1921.

After the Fascist takeover in Italy in 1923, he was transferred undercover to the Soviet Union as an aviation engineer. Along with his transfer, he took along all the latest Italian design and avant-garde technology he was able to gather. He occupied several engineering and command positions in the Soviet Air Force and Red Army. He became the head of the department of amphibious experimental aircraft design in 1928. He was the head of the design department of NII GVF (Russian: Zavod Opytno Konstruktorskoye Nauchno-Issledovatel'skiy Institut Grazhdanskovo Vozdushnovo Flota — "Factory for Special Construction at the Scientific Test Institute for the Civil Air Fleet"), general designer (chief designer), since 1930.

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