Włoski baron zbudował dla Stalina latającego potwora

An Italian baron built a flying monster for Stalin. This is the true story of Roberto Bartini, the illegitimate son of an Italian aristocrat, born in 1897, whose mother drowned shortly after his birth. He fled Mussolini's fascism to the Soviet Union to become a star of the Soviet Air Force and a teacher to Sergei Korolev, the future father of Soviet cosmonautics. In 1938, the NKVD arrested him as an alleged spy for the fascist Italy he himself had fled, and sentenced him to 10 years as an enemy of the people. He endured the Gulag and prison design bureau, designed machines from behind bars alongside Andrei Tupolev, and only fully recovered in 1956. As an old man, he built his most daring machine, the VVA-14, a flying dragon nicknamed the Viper Gorynych, designed to hunt American submarines armed with Polaris missiles. It was designed to take off vertically from land, water, sand, and ice using 12 lifting engines, then glide just above the waves in ground effect, invisible to radar. It made its first flight on September 4, 1972, but the vertical takeoff was never successful, as the engines never arrived. After 107 flights and the designer's death in 1974, the project died, but Bartini's ideas lived on in Soviet ekranoplanes, and his apprentice led an entire country to the stars. This is the story of a genius who could be beaten and crushed, but an idea ahead of its time cannot be grounded. Music used: "Eyes of Glory" by Aakash Gandhi and "Duty Calls" by Rod Kim. Images from archive.org are publicly available.