[1] Robert Bartini was born on 14 May 1897, in Fiume, Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Rijeka, Croatia), the son of an unmarried 17-year-old girl of noble origins.

[9] Bartini graduated from gymnasium in 1915, and upon the outbreak of the First World War was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army and sent to an officers' reserve school in Besztercebánya (now Banská Bystrica, Slovakia).

Bartini moved to Italy and received citizenship, where he became a member of the Italian Communist Party (ICP) and attended flying school in 1921, and began studying aerospace at the Politecnico di Milano in 1922.

After the Fascist takeover in Italy in October 1922, the ICP sent Bartini to the Soviet Union as an aviation engineer, taking all the latest Italian design and avant-garde technology he was able to gather.

Bartini initially worked at an airport near Khodynka Field in Moscow before occupying several engineering and command positions for the research wing of the Soviet Air Force.

The following year he was transferred to the OKBS MAP design bureau in Lyubertsy with Pavel Vladimirovich Tsybin, and received backing from Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov, at the time the Minister of Defense of the USSR.

High esteem for his contributions to defense afforded him the help from Pontecorvo and Gershtein to publish his theoretical physics paper in the prestigious Proceedings of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (Doklady).

The paper develops the idea of the dimension of spacetime which is dynamical, equal to four only on average, and presenting an argument in favor using some numerological relations between physical constants.

The extensive development of these vehicles led to Bartini's first output in 1964, with the Be-1, a small prototype ekranoplan made for research by the Beriev Design Bureau.

He was buried at Vvedenskoye Cemetery with a grave featuring a monument with the inscription "In the land of the Soviets, he kept his oath to devote all life that the red planes flew faster than the black (ones)".

At various times and to different degrees, Bartini has been connected with other prominent Soviet aircraft engineers such as Sergey Ilyushin, Oleg Antonov, Vladimir Myasishchev, Alexander Yakovlev and many others.