Robert Aleksandrovich Shtilmark (April 3, 1909, Moscow – September 30, 1985) was a Soviet writer and journalist.

Shtilmark worked as an assistant and head of the department of the Scandinavian countries in the All–Union Society of Cultural Relations with Abroad.

Subsequently, he was an international journalist in the newspaper Izvestia, in the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union, worked as an editor in the magazines "Foreign Literature", "Young Guard".

In 1942, after a serious injury and concussion, he was sent as a teacher to the Tashkent Infantry School, then transferred to Moscow, taught at the Higher Command Courses of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army.

He was arrested a month before the end of the war, during the war he worked in the editorial and publishing department of the General Staff, a military officer who fought under besieged Leningrad was convicted (under Article 58–10) "for chatter": he named a building in Moscow "matchbox", did not approve of the demolition of the Sukharev Tower and the Red Gate and the renaming of old cities, and so on.

Shtilmark is the author of the adventure novel The Heir From Calcutta, commissioned by the crime boss Vasily Vasilevsky.

[5] In 1959, Vasilevsky, also released under an amnesty, tried to sue himself half of the fees, but it turned out that Shtilmark had prudently embedded a cipher text into one of the chapters of the novel, proving his authorship.

Shtilmark, despite the lack of money and great ability to work, treated everything that came out of his pen with high exactingness, as a result of which most of his plans were not completed and remained either in drafts or in the memory of the audience (Shtilmark was recognized as an excellent storyteller): novels "The Gem of Feroniera", "Koptevskiy Gentleman", stories about the artists Pavel Korin and Mikhail Nesterov.

Stories "The Feat of Love" (about Vladimir Dal) and "The Winged Prisoner" (another name: "The Fighter Seeks Battle"; about the honored pilot Vyacheslav Valentey who escaped from Nazi captivity), as well as an extensive epistolary legacy remained unpublished.