About the book: 2005 / Small nimble fighters developed by Nikolai Nikolaevich Polikarpov, without any doubt, were the most successful and famous Soviet aircraft of the 30s . However, the development of the designs proposed by Polikarpov was quite contradictory. On the one hand, the I-16 was the world's first monoplane fighter with retractable landing gear, but, on the other hand, the I-153 became the last mass-produced biplane fighter.