“At the time, in 1933, the speed record in the USSR was 170 mph, so it was almost 100 mph faster than the best Soviet fighters,” said Sergej Težak, a professor of transport engineering at the Maribor University in Slovenia. With a full stainless steel body and a single, retractable front wheel, it looked like something from the future, at a time when the materials of choice for aircraft construction were wood and fabric. In reality, he was working on a monoplane fighter aircraft, the Stal-6, of which a single prototype was built - the first Bartini project to make the leap from the drawing board to the runway. Officially, Bartini was designing passenger planes. He first worked on experimental amphibious aircraft and then - after getting fired for criticizing the very organization that employed him - he was hired by the research wing of the Red Army. In the USSR, Bartini changed his name again to Robert Ludvigovich Bartini, after his father Ludovico and following Slavic naming conventions. To avoid his capture, the party sent him to the Soviet Union as an aviation engineer, putting his talent and Italy’s expertise in the field - at the time among the best in the world - at the service of the motherland. When Mussolini took power in late 1922 with a coup, however, Bartini became wanted by the police. Within the ranks of the party he received his nickname, “Red Baron,” referencing his noble origins and the color traditionally associated with communism. Using the name Roberto Orosdy, in 1921 he joined the nascent Italian Communist Party, where his familiarity with languages, weapons and aristocracy made him a promising intelligence officer. He already spoke perfect Italian, which wasn’t uncommon among residents of Fiume. He eventually made it back to Fiume, which was in a state of political turmoil following the dissolution of Austria-Hungary.Įager to complete his studies, Bartini moved to Italy to attend aerospace engineering courses at Milan’s Polytechnic Institute, as well as a flight school near Rome.
Upon his release, he didn’t have enough money for the trip back home and spent some time in Shanghai as a taxi driver.
Quickly captured, Bartini was sent as a prisoner of war to a camp in Siberia, where he became familiar with Communist literature and remained until the end of the war. That was likely the seed of young Roberto’s passion for aviation, which he only had a short time to explore: in 1916, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and sent to the Eastern Front to fight against the Russian Empire in World War I. Aged 15, Bartini attended an air show featuring a Russian pilot flying on a Beriot XI, one of the very first mass-produced airplanes.
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