Early life Robert Bartini was born on 14 May 1897, in
Fiume,
Austria-Hungary (now
Rijeka,
Croatia). He gave widely varying accounts of his parents' identity. In a 2020 biography, Sergej Lezak stated that it was "still quite unclear" who Bartini's parents were and where he was from. He evidently grew up in Austria-Hungary at Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) and/or
Miskolc. His father was apparently a member of a
Hungarian aristocratic family, although Bartini's comments make it unclear which of two brothers named Orosdy was his father. His mother may have been named Bartini and of
Italian noble origins. In other accounts, however, Bartini stated that his surname came from his father. And when questioned by the
NKVD in 1938, Bartini stated that he had been born in
Kanjiza,
Kingdom of Hungary (modern-day
Serbia) that his mother's surname was Fersel and that his father was an
Austrian nobleman named Formaha. According to other sources, he was born in
Nagykanizsa, Hungary (may have been confused with Kanjiza, as both town was colloquially called "Kanizsa" in Hungarian) and his mother was called Maria Ferlesch, born in
Villach. Most often, Bartini claimed to have been the son of an unmarried 17-year-old woman of noble origins, and that his mother had
drowned herself shortly after his birth when his father, a married man, refused to recognize him as his son. Bartini claimed that his father was named Ludovico (Hungarian: Lajos) Orosdy, (a.k.a de Orosd et Bö and/or Oros de Bartini), a
baron of the Austro-Hungarian nobility. Philippe (Fülöp) Orosdy was made a baron in 1905. As an infant, Bartini was fostered by a family from the city of
Miskolc. Most accounts state that despite their noble background, Bartini's biological relatives were impoverished and that his foster parents were
peasants. Bartini graduated from
gymnasium in 1915, and upon the outbreak of the
First World War was
drafted into the
Austro-Hungarian Army and sent to an
officers' reserve school in
Besztercebánya (now Banská Bystrica,
Slovakia). Upon graduation in 1916, Bartini was sent to the
Eastern Front where he was captured by
Russian troops in June 1916 and detained at a
prisoner of war camp in near
Khabarovsk in the
Russian Far East. He remained at the camp for the remainder of the war and was eventually released in 1920. Bartini returned home to find administration of Fiume being fought over by the local
Italian and
Croat populaces, as well as
Italy and the
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, resulting in the
Free State of Fiume. Bartini moved to
Italy and received citizenship, where he became a member of the
Italian Communist Party (ICP) and attended
flying school in 1921, and began studying
aerospace at the
Politecnico di Milano in 1922.
Soviet Union After the
Fascist takeover in Italy in October 1922, the ICP sent Bartini to the
Soviet Union as an
aviation engineer, taking all the latest Italian design and
avant-garde technology he was able to gather. Bartini received Soviet citizenship and changed his name to Robert Ludvigovich Bartini according to
Eastern Slavic naming customs. Bartini initially worked at an airport near
Khodynka Field in
Moscow before occupying several engineering and command positions for the research wing of the
Soviet Air Force. In 1928, Bartini began working for the Central Design Bureau building
seaplanes near
Sevastopol and the following year became the head of the department of
amphibious experimental aircraft design, but was fired in 1930 for writing a letter to the
Central Committee of the CPSU criticizing the existence of the organization. Bartini was quickly hired by the research wing of the
Red Army where he began working on the Stal-series of
airplanes. At the International Exhibition in Paris in August 1936, the
Bartini Stal-7 broke the international speed record. He also published papers concerning aviation construction materials and technology,
aerodynamics, dynamics of flight, and even
theoretical physics. In 1938, Bartini was arrested by the
NKVD on charges of being an "
enemy of the people" and a
spy for
Fascist Italy. He was
extrajudicially convicted by a
troika, receiving a 10-year
imprisonment sentence. During his imprisonment Bartini continued his work on new aircraft designs, first at the
sharashka TsKB-29, an NKVD experiment aircraft design bureau in Moscow where he worked with
Andrei Tupolev designing the
Tupolev Tu-2, which became one of the most important Soviet aircraft of
World War II. Bartini's Stal-7 plane also became the base for the
Yermolayev Yer-2 bomber, also used by the Soviet Air Force during the war. When
German troops were close to Moscow during the
German invasion of the Soviet Union, TsKB-29 was moved from the city to
Omsk where Bartini led his own design bureau,
OKB-86. His bureau was disbanded in 1943, and he began working on various
transport plane projects. Bartini was released in 1946, later working at the Dimitrov Aircraft Factory in
Taganrog until 1952, when he became the chief engineer of advanced aircraft designs at the
Scientific Research Institute in
Novosibirsk. In 1956, during the
De-Stalinization under
Nikita Khrushchev, Bartini was officially
rehabilitated by the Soviet state. The following year he was transferred to the OKBS MAP design bureau in
Lyubertsy with Pavel Vladimirovich Tsybin, and received backing from
Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov, at the time the
Minister of Defense of the USSR. Zhukov was forced out the position shortly afterwards, and most of the projects he backed were cancelled. In 1961, Bartini had proposed a
nuclear-powered supersonic long-range reconnaissance aircraft. Contributions of Bartini were well appreciated at the highest levels of the Soviet government, and he was awarded the
Order of Lenin in 1967. High esteem for his contributions to defense afforded him the help from
Pontecorvo and
Gershtein to publish his theoretical physics paper in the prestigious Proceedings of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences (Doklady). The paper was considered to be strange even by Gershtein who was asked to help edit it and prepare for publication, while after the publication some prominent physicists initially thought that "Roberto Oros di Bartini" was a fictitious name invented specially for a scientific hoax. Bartini himself was apparently very proud of his paper, signed it with his noble name, and confided in Gershtein that this was the most important contribution of his lifetime. The paper develops the idea of the dimension of spacetime which is dynamical, equal to four only on average, and presenting an argument in favor using some numerological relations between physical constants.
Ground-effect vehicles at the
Central Air Force Museum. In the mid-1950s, Bartini became involved in
ground-effect vehicles, named
ekranoplans, in which the Soviet government developed a great interest. The extensive development of these vehicles led to Bartini's first output in 1964, with the
Be-1, a small prototype ekranoplan made for research by the
Beriev Design Bureau. In 1968, Bartini returned to Taganrog to specifically develop
seaplanes, where began development of his last known project, the
Bartini Beriev VVA-14, an experimental ekranoplan featuring
vertical takeoff intended to be used in
anti-submarine warfare against American submarines armed with
Polaris missiles. ==Death==