I'd never heard of this plane before a friend gave me a freebie (and quite old) Russian 1/72 scale kit, but it turns out it was an interesting plane with a good history, and they were a successful enough design that the Russians in the 1930s built 7000 of them.
The Polikarpov R5 was an all-rounder plane, a light bomber and general reconnaissance plane. The prototype was built in 1928, using a BMW V1 47-litre V12 engine. Fitted with an exact copy of this engine, made in Russia under licence, the Polikarpov saw action in the Spanish Civil War, the battle of Khalkhin Gol against the Japanese in Mongolia in 1939, and also in World War Two in Russia. By then it was too slow and vulnerable for much daytime work, but it was a perfectly good pest at night, and it also supported the partisans in various ways.
I used thin plastic rods for the cross-braces, painted charcoal, and they look kinda thick! I've seen how the experts do it using fine line, and as a newbie I think I'll wait another couple of years before I learn how to do that.
One amazing thing about this very crude and ancient kit is that the decals went on just fine.
The kit didn't include any screens, so I attempted to cut and bend some flat acetate to make a dodgy pair of screens. I think I need lots more scratch-building lessons.
For the record, here's the kit box. I used the box cover artwork as a basis for my paint job.
There wasn't much to the kit, and lots of cleaning up was need to virtually all parts, but the important bit wa that the fuselage halves lined up nicely, so to did all the little pins and holes, so it all went together without too much bother.