The priest’s son

Nikolai Polikarpov was born in 1892 in a village near Livny, the son of a country priest, and trained for the priesthood himself before turning to engineering in Saint Petersburg. After graduating in 1916 he worked under Igor Sikorsky on the giant Ilya Muromets bomber. He stayed after the Revolution, joined the Dux factory in Moscow in 1918 and in 1922 became head of its technical department. That year the plant, now GAZ No. 1, was told to copy the British Airco DH.9. Polikarpov recalculated and redesigned it, and the resulting R-1 became the first Soviet aircraft built in large numbers — more than 2,400 of them.

Death sentence in the hangar

In 1923 he also designed the I-1, a cantilever low-wing monoplane fighter years ahead of its time. But the Soviet system was dangerous for designers. In October 1929, after an over-ambitious five-year-plan fighter missed its deadline, Polikarpov and some 450 engineers were arrested on fabricated sabotage charges. He was sentenced to death. After two months awaiting execution he was sent instead to a prison design bureau, first in Butyrka prison and then in a hangar at Moscow’s Plant No. 39 known as the internal prison. There the prisoners built the I-5 fighter. After Stalin saw it fly in June 1931, Polikarpov was amnestied. The charges were formally dropped only in 1956.

The donkey and the gull

The 1930s were his golden decade. The I-16 first flew on 30 December 1933 with Valery Chkalov at the controls: a stubby monoplane with retractable landing gear, the first such fighter to reach squadron service anywhere. Soviet pilots called it Ishak, the donkey; in Spain Republicans called it Mosca and Nationalists Rata. More than 10,000 single-seaters were built. Alongside it came the gull-winged I-15 and I-153 Chaika biplanes. Together they formed the backbone of Soviet fighter aviation from 1934 to 1941 and earned Polikarpov the title King of Fighters.

Chkalov’s last flight

Then luck ran out. On 15 December 1938 Chkalov, the national hero who had flown over the North Pole to America, took up the first I-180 and crashed short of the airfield on approach. He was killed. In 1939 Polikarpov was sent on a trip to Germany; while he was away, his deputy director and engineer Mikhail Gurevich proposed a new fighter, the I-200, and won approval for a new bureau under Artem Mikoyan, brother of a Politburo member. Polikarpov came home to find his engineers working for MiG. His later I-185 was promising but never entered production.

The Kukuruznik and the Night Witches

His most enduring design was the humblest. The U-2 biplane first flew on 7 January 1928 and became the Soviet Union’s basic trainer and crop-duster, nicknamed Kukuruznik. In the Second World War it became a night bomber, most famously with the all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment, the Night Witches, who flew more than 23,000 sorties gliding in with engines idling. Renamed Po-2 in his honour in 1944, it was built in numbers estimated at 20,000 to 33,000. Polikarpov died of stomach cancer on 30 July 1944, aged 52; his bureau was absorbed by Lavochkin and his plant later went to Sukhoi.

Fabrieken

• GAZ No. 1 (former Dux factory) · Moscow — Base of the bureau in the 1920s and again from 1939; purpose-built design building still stands
• Plant No. 39 (TsKB-39) · Moscow — Prison design bureau, 1929–1931, and Central Design Bureau brigade No. 2 to 1936
• Plant No. 156 · Moscow — Polikarpov chief designer and technical director from 1937–1938

Mensen

• Nikolai Polikarpov · founder and chief designer — 1892–1944; Hero of Socialist Labour 1940, Stalin Prize 1941 and 1943
• Valery Chkalov · test pilot — Flew the I-16 first flight in 1933; killed in the first I-180 in 1938
• Mikhail Gurevich · design engineer — Left with colleagues to co-found the Mikoyan-Gurevich bureau in 1939
• Dmitry Tomashevich · deputy chief designer — Supervised the I-180 work
• Marina Raskova · aviator, organiser of women’s regiments — Formed the regiments including the 588th, which flew the Po-2

Records en primeurs

• I-16: first low-wing cantilever monoplane fighter with retractable landing gear to reach operational squadron status
• Po-2: one of the most-produced aircraft in history