Russo-Balt (sometimes Russobalt or Russo-Baltique) was one of the first Russian company that produced cars between 1909 and 1923.

Russo-Baltic Wagon Corp.

The Russo-Baltic Wagon Factory (German: Russisch-Baltischen Waggonfabrik; Russian: Русско-Балтийский вагонный завод, RBVZ) was founded in 1874 in Riga, then a major industiral centre of Russian Empire. Originally the new company was a subsidiary of the Van der Zypen & CharlierCologne-Deutz, Germany. In 1894 the majority of its shares were sold to investors in Riga and St. Petersburg, among them local Baltic German merchants F. Meyer, K. Amelung, and Chr. Schroeder, as well as Schaje Berlin, a relative of Isaiah Berlin. The company eventually grew to 3,800 employees. company in

Automobile manufacturing

Between 1909 and 1915 the cars were built at the railway car factory RBVZ. After the 1917 revolutionMoscow. Russo-Balt produced trucks, buses and cars, often more or less copies of cars from the German Rex-Simplex or Belgian Fondu Trucks. a second factory was opened in St. Petersburg, where they built armoured cars on chassis produced in Riga. In 1922, the production was moved from St. Petersburg to BTAZ in

Only two original cars have survived to the present day. One is a Russo-Balt fire engine built on truck chassis Type D in year 1912. Car is on display at the Riga Motor Museum in Latvia. Another one is Russo-Balt K12/20 from 1911, is shown at the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow, Russia.

Today in Riga, Latvia, there is a company named Russo-Balt that manufactures trailers. There are no connection to pre-war Russo-Balt except company name.

Airplane manufacturing

In early 1912 company director M. V. Shidlovsky hired 22-year-old Igor Sikorsky as the chief engineer for RBVZ's new aircraft division in St. Petersburg. Sikorsky's airplane had recently won a military aircraft competition in Moscow. He brought several engineers with him to RBVZ, and agreed that the company would own his designs for the next five years. This group quickly produced a series of airplanes, the S-7, S-9, S-11, S-12, The Grand, and a series named Il'ya Muromets which flew in the first World War.^[2]

In 1914, Shidlovsky was appointed commander of the newly formed EVK ("Eskadra vozdushnykh korablei"), or Squadron of Flying Ships, which flew the Il'ya Muromets bombers during World War One. In 1918, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, Shidlovsky left for France. Shidlovsky and his son were arrested in 1919, while attempting to escape the Bolsheviks by going to Finland and both were murdered