When, at the end of the Great Patriotic War, “Stalin’s falcons” first encountered Luftwaffe jets in battle, the Me-262 fighter-bomber made such an impression on Soviet specialists that they tried to “break through” the decision to produce it in the USSR. However, the country's leadership chose to rely on domestic industry, using captured German technologies rather than copying them. In the shortest possible time, our leading design bureaus - Yakovlev, Mikoyan, Sukhoi, Lavochkin, Tupolev, Ilyushin and others - developed more than 25 jet aircraft, the most successful of which were the MiG-9 and Yak-15/17... In this book you will find comprehensive information about all the firstborns of the jet age and the first post-war generation of USSR aviation, as well as about the experimental directions that turned out to be “dead-end” - rocket, pulse and ramjet power plants. The collector's edition on premium quality coated paper is illustrated with hundreds of exclusive drawings and photographs.