Roberto Bartini is a "man of mystery". Who was this Italian? Aircraft designer or mathematician, writer or artist? Or maybe, as some quite seriously claim, he was an alien? But whoever he really is, almost all historians agree that Roberto Bartini is a genius from the galaxy of Leonardo Da Vinci, Giordano Bruno and Galileo, great scientists born on the Apennine Peninsula. Having left his homeland in 1923 and, by the will of fate, finding himself in the Soviet Union, Bartini fully tasted all the joys and sorrows of life in the USSR. Before leaving Italy, he swore an oath to his comrades in the Italian Communist Party to dedicate his life to making red planes fly faster than black ones. Roberto Bartini remained faithful to this oath to the end.