A borrowed fighter and a fresh start

In the summer of 1939 Nikolai Polikarpov, the Soviet Union’s most celebrated fighter designer, fell out of favour with Stalin. His half-finished high-altitude fighter, the I-200, was handed to two engineers from his own bureau: Artem Mikoyan, a 34-year-old graduate of the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, and Mikhail Gurevich, an engineer twelve years his senior who had studied in Montpellier and Toulouse. On 8 December 1939 they were given their own design department at Aviation Plant No. 1 in Moscow. The I-200 flew on 5 April 1940 as the MiG-1 — Mikoyan i Gurevich, Mikoyan and Gurevich — and a name was born that would outlive the country that coined it.

Won on the toss of a coin

It did not help that Mikoyan’s elder brother was Anastas Mikoyan, a rising Soviet statesman. The bureau’s first fighter, the MiG-3, was fast at altitude but the war was fought low, and after 3,422 had been built Stalin demanded that factories switch to the Il-2 Shturmovik, whose engine was a close cousin of the MiG’s. Then came the jet age. On 24 April 1946 MiG and Yakovlev arrived at the same airfield with rival jet prototypes. According to the historian Bill Gunston, the two teams tossed a coin to decide who would fly first. MiG won, and its I-300, later the MiG-9, became the first Soviet turbojet aircraft to take to the air — for six minutes.

The engine Britain sold

The breakthrough came from an unlikely supplier. Britain’s post-war Labour government agreed to sell the Soviet Union the Rolls-Royce Nene, the most developed jet engine of its day; Stalin had reportedly doubted anyone would be so foolish. Copied as the Klimov RD-45, it powered the swept-wing MiG-15, which first flew on 30 December 1947 — three months after its future adversary, North American’s F-86 Sabre. Over Korea from November 1950 the MiG-15 shocked the Americans, who offered 100,000 dollars to any pilot who would deliver one. In September 1953 a North Korean lieutenant, No Kum-sok, did exactly that. More than 13,000 were built in the USSR, and thousands more under licence.

The most-produced supersonic jet

The MiG-17 refined the formula and, two decades later, embarrassed far faster American jets over Vietnam. The MiG-19 became the first Soviet production aircraft to go supersonic in level flight. But the bureau’s masterpiece was the little delta-winged MiG-21, whose Ye-2 ancestor flew on 14 February 1955. Some 11,496 were built in the USSR, India and Czechoslovakia between 1959 and 1986 — the most-produced supersonic jet in history, before even counting China’s copies. India flew it for 62 years and finally retired it on 26 September 2025, a farewell clouded by the loss of roughly 400 of its 872 airframes in accidents.

Mach 3 and a defection to Japan

Gurevich retired in 1964, the year the bureau flew its most startling machine. The MiG-25, airborne on 6 March 1964, was built largely of steel to survive the heat of Mach 3; one reconnaissance example was tracked over Sinai at Mach 3.2, wrecking its engines. On 6 September 1976 Lieutenant Viktor Belenko landed a MiG-25P at Hakodate in Japan and defected, handing Western analysts the aircraft for 67 days. A year later, on 31 August 1977, test pilot Alexander Fedotov zoom-climbed a MiG-25 to 37,650 metres, an absolute altitude record. Artem Mikoyan did not live to see it: he died in December 1970 and was buried at Novodevichy.

Fulcrum, then the long squeeze

Under Rostislav Belyakov the bureau produced the MiG-31 interceptor, first flown on 16 September 1975, and the MiG-29, first flown on 6 October 1977. More than 1,600 Fulcrums went to over 30 nations, and a MiG-29K made the type’s first landing and take-off on the carrier Tbilisi on 1 November 1989. The 1990s were brutal. The bureau merged with the Znamya Truda factory in 1995 and was renamed Russian Aircraft Corporation MiG in December 1999. Its fifth-generation fighter, Project 1.44, finally flew on 29 February 2000, made a second flight that April and never flew again.

Two old rivals under one roof

In 2006 the Russian state folded MiG into the new United Aircraft Corporation alongside its historic rival Sukhoi, and by 2017 the company was shedding staff for want of orders. On 1 June 2022 the legal entity disappeared into UAC altogether, with management promising that the MiG brand and its design school would live on. They have: the MiG-31K carries the Kinzhal missile in the war in Ukraine, the MiG-35 is in limited Russian service, and one count puts MiG-brand output at around 47,000 aircraft at home and 62,000 including licence production. From a borrowed design in 1939, few manufacturers anywhere have built more fighters.

Fabrieken

• Aviation Plant No. 1 · Moscow — Where the bureau was born as a design department in December 1939
• MiG Manufacturing Complex No. 1 · Lukhovitsy, Moscow Oblast — Main MiG production plant
• MiG Manufacturing Complex No. 2 (Znamya Truda) · Moscow — Former Plant No. 30; merged with the bureau in 1995 as MAPO-MiG; about 30,000 workers in the early 1990s

Mensen

• Artem Mikoyan · co-founder, chief designer — Born 1905 in Sanahin, Armenia; brother of Anastas Mikoyan; twice Hero of Socialist Labour; died 9 December 1970
• Mikhail Gurevich · co-founder, deputy then chief designer — Born 1893; studied at Montpellier and SUPAERO in Toulouse; retired 1964; died 1976
• Nikolai Polikarpov · designer — Work on the I-200, which became the MiG-1, began under him in June 1939
• Rostislav Belyakov · general designer — Led the bureau after Mikoyan into the 1990s; MiG-29 and MiG-31; died 2014
• Alexander Fedotov · test pilot — Set the MiG-25 absolute altitude record of 37,650 m in 1977
• Georgy Mosolov · test pilot — World speed and altitude records in Mikoyan prototypes, 1959–1962
• Toktar Aubakirov · test pilot — First MiG-29K landing and take-off on the carrier Tbilisi, 1 November 1989

Records en primeurs

• MiG-9: first Soviet turbojet aircraft to fly, 24 April 1946
• MiG-19: first Soviet production aircraft supersonic in level flight
• MiG-21: most-produced supersonic jet aircraft in history, 11,496 built
• World speed record of 2,388 km/h by Georgy Mosolov, 31 October 1959; later 2,681 km/h in the Ye-166
• Ye-152-1 world record flights in 1961 and 1962, registered with the FAI as the Ye-166
• Absolute altitude record of 37,650 m by Alexander Fedotov in a MiG-25, 31 August 1977