This great aircraft designer did not receive worldwide recognition during his lifetime, although he left a noticeable mark on the history of aircraft construction, and now he is increasingly called “the secret inspirer of the Soviet space program” and even “Korolev’s teacher.” His fate is tragic and mysterious - it is not for nothing that ROBERTO BARTINI became the prototype of Bulgakov's Woland from The Master and Margarita. His long-range Arctic reconnaissance aircraft DAR was a generation ahead of its time, the Stal-6 was the fastest fighter of the early 1930s, and the Er-2 long-range bomber, created on the basis of the super-fast Stal-7, bombed Berlin in the summer of 1941 . However, Bartini himself at that time was serving time in the Gulag under the political Article 58. Why was the Italian communist aristocrat, who emigrated to the USSR (since then, in all questionnaires in the “nationality” column, Bartini wrote “Russian”) and became one of the leaders of the Soviet aviation industry, was condemned as a “fascist spy”? Whose fault was it that he served his full term (although other repressed aircraft designers were released from the “sharashkas” after successful projects) and was actually in disgrace until the end of his life? Why was one of the greatest innovators of Soviet aviation, the creator of the first ekranoplanes, a “headache” for his superiors? And how, despite all the obstacles, he managed to keep his youthful vow, “devoting his whole life to making red planes fly faster than black ones” (these words are inscribed on the grave of R.L. Bartini).