Engineer Roberto L. Bartini was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party and emigrated to the USSR in 1923. He advocated the use of steel in place of aluminum in Soviet aircraft due to its lower cost, and designed a copy of the Dornier Wal flying boat entirely in stainless steel. After the crash of the Stal-7 prototype airliner in 1938 he was arrested by the OGPU and transferred to Omsk in Siberia where he formed Prison Design Bureau #4 and began designing supersonic aircraft in 1940! He was officially rehabilitated in 1946. In 1948 he became one of the elite few to survive a second purging by Stalin when his OKB-86 was closed after only two years. During the 1950s he led a sort of nomadic existence in various design bureaus and aircraft factories, producing a series of ever more fantastic designs. My favorite is the Mach 3 seaplane bomber which would refuel from a submarine in a Greenland fjord.



In 1959, the Soviet leadership went into a panic about the Polaris SLBM program and began an orgy of R&D spending on unlikely technologies to counter missile subs. Bartini got onto this gravy train with a giant STOL amphibious floatplane called VVA-14 and continued to mess around with it until his death in 1974. A damaged example is the oddest exhibit at the Monino air museum.



I don't know what message this new rocket bureau is trying to send by naming itself after a airplane designer who worked for 50 years without getting a design into production. Maybe it is a subtle joke.



