At the beginning of the 20th century,
the Russian Navy experienced a series of shocks that brought it to its knees.
The first significant hit came with the Russo-Japanese War,
when the Russian Empire lost almost all of its big ships;
then World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917,
and the bloody Civil War that followed, destroyed both the Empire and its Navy.
Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks looked to the future with optimism
when they started building the new socialist state.
They saw a future in which the mightiest ships in the world—Soviet ships—
would sail on the high seas,
protecting the peace and prosperity of the Soviet Union.
Naval Legends Battleship Sovetsky Soyuz
In 1927, with the threat of war in the past,
and diplomatic relations with Great Britain broken,
it became obvious that the Soviet Union couldn't repel an attack,
even if it came from neighboring Poland and Romania.
For this reason, in 1928,
the state approved a program for the first five-year plans.
These resulted in the development of their heavy industry,
particularly the metallurgy industry,
which enabled the start of military construction
and the development of the Armed Forces.
So, the state approved the program for building large capital ships
within the framework developing the Armed Forces and military construction.
The program of large shipbuilding, adopted in 1936,
presupposed that in the following 10 years
it would introduce around 530 ships of the primary types into service,
with a total displacement of more than 1.3 million tons.
Battleships were planned to have comprised half of that tonnage.
The funniest part of this was that not a single great country in the world,
out of their potential enemies,
considered the Soviet Union as an enemy they might battle at sea.
That's why they were completely indifferent
to anything that the Soviet Union planned to construct.
Moreover, one shouldn't forget that the Soviet state was absolutely closed.
Everyone was under suspicion; everything was top secret.
That's why the countries of the West didn't even suspect
that we were planning or building anything.
Soviet shipbuilders based their knowledge
of how a battleship of that era was supposed to be
on the characteristics of the new heavy ships
being built by leading sea states in the mid-1930s.
In February 1936, the requirements specifications
for designing a Baltic Sea Battleship (Project 21)
and a Pacific Ocean Battleship (Project 23) were formulated.
After revisions of the technical requirements specification of Project 23,
it was named as a Type "A" Battleship.
In the spring of 1937, when officials of the Soviet Union
learnt that the Japanese and Germans had started building battleships
with a minimum displacement of 50,000 tons,
the Ministry of the Shipbuilding Industry suggested that the design bureaus
should rework the project, without any limitations, in a period of three months.
In November 1937, Project 23 received its third revision.
After 18 months, its final requirements specification were approved,
and by that time, two ships were already under construction.
The ships should have been built in series, four battleships at a time.
The keel of flagship Sovetsky Soyuz was laid down in Leningrad.
The hulls of Sovetskaya Rossiya and Sovetskaya Byelorossia
were laid down in Molotovsk, which is called now Severodvinsk,
and another, the hull of Sovetskaya Ukraina, in Nikolaev.
Performance characteristics of Project 23 Battleship, 1939.
Length: almost 270 meters. Width: almost 39 meters.
Draught: 10.45 meters. Full displacement: 65,150 tons.
Armor. Primary armor belt: 375-420 mm.
Total horizontal armor: 230 mm.
Main battery turrets: 230-495 mm.
Armament. Main battery: nine 406-mm B-37 guns in three turrets.
Secondary battery: twelve 152-mm B-38 guns in six turret mounts.
AA battery: four twin mounts with 100-mm B-54 guns.
Eight 37-mm quadruple 46-K machineguns.
Aircraft Armament: four KOR-2 seaplanes.
Main propulsion plant:
six water-tube boilers and three main geared turbine units.
Full power: 231,000 hp. Maximum speed: 28 knots.
Travel distance: 7,200 miles at a speed of 14 knots.
According to the "Shipbuilding Program of 1938-1945"
approved by the USSR Committee of Defense,
the following number of ships were planned for introduction into service:
six battleships for the Pacific Ocean fleet, four for the Baltic fleet,
three for the Black Sea fleet, and two for the Northern fleet.
What does it mean to build 15 battleships?
Can you imagine the required industrial base?
These battleships required special factories to produce their ammunition,
artillery mounts, machinery, and so on…
The entire economy of the country was geared towards this.
At the time the ships of Project 23 Sovetsky Soyuz were laid down,
the Soviet Union was suffering from a severe lack of shipbuilding facilities
which could hold such heavy ships.
For that reason,
a factory in Molotovsk, known now as Severodvinsk, was constructed.
It had two roofed dockyards,
which were used for constructing ship hulls all year round.
It allowed the construction of ships
in the severe north climatic weather conditions all year round.
The weather conditions had no effect on production—
quite a desirable novelty in the world's shipbuilding industry.
The difficulties that Soviet industry had to face
during the construction of these ships were unprecedented.
Delays in supplying steel for hulls to the shipyards,
difficulties in producing armor at the required quality and volume,
and, most importantly, a lack of skilled specialists.
Pre-revolution experience in designing and building large ships
was partially lost or obsolete,
and as a result, the young Soviet school of shipbuilders
had to catch up on the trends of the time, fast.
Imagine you're an automobile engineer, you're called to Moscow,
and then told: "Today, you'll be building not cars, but tanks T-80 or T-90."
How would you respond? Perhaps you'd say:
"But I've never built anything like that!"
And they might respond: "Does that mean that you can't build a tank?
Are you an enemy of the Soviet Union? A German spy?”
Now, you've been brainwashed.
It’s neither bad, nor good. It's just a fact.
Plus, you're a member of the Communist party, you're a patriot,
and you almost certainly don't want to be executed by firing squad.
All of those things in combination
forced people to work, study, and learn new things.
This is this phenomenon of Soviet engineers of the 1930s, 40s, and even 50s.
They were working 12-16 hours a day.
That was a particular Stalinist style,
when a boss worked until eight or nine o'clock in the evening,
and all of their subordinates did the same.
What does it mean that you want to go home? Your boss is working.
Your boss is thinking about how to build battleship Sovetsky Soyuz.
Aren’t you thinking about that as well? Yes, you are thinking about that too.
The authorities of the country and their Armed Forces
were inspired by the successes of their industrialization,
aviation industry, and tank-building industry.
They were excited about the shipbuilders,
who never stopped refining and upgrading their projects,
even after they had been laid down.
Lacking the necessary experience, searching for optimal solutions
required more extensive experiments and theoretical research,
which couldn't be always accounted for
in the approved terms of the construction program.
Everything was in a mess: specialists, organization, etc.
They had no idea how put all of that together.
The structure of the battleship was constantly changing.
When engineers began laying down the keel,
they were still working out what kind of battleship they should build.
Why did this happen? Once again, we didn't have the technology.
We didn't have an assembly line for battleships.
Technology had moved too far forward,
and the Soviet engineers needed to build completely different ships
compared to those which had been built by the Russian Empire.
Obviously that introduced some significant corrections
into the general understanding of how ships should have looked.
To advance their capabilities, they tried to acquire experience from abroad.
So, the Soviets contacted the United States, France, Germany, and Italy.
You should understand that it was the 20th century, and no country
could build anything in total isolation and without help of other countries.
First of all, they needed to research the battleships of foreign countries,
starting with their potential enemies.
Caliber, speed, armor—
the funny part was that all of this data was available in open sources.
Taking into account the fact that the firepower of any battleship
is mostly in its primary guns, the firepower of Sovetsky Soyuz
should have corresponded to the firepower of comparable foreign ships.
At that time, the largest known foreign naval artillery guns
had a caliber of 406 mm. The project for a 406 mm gun
had been in development for the needs of the Russian Imperial Navy
before the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Almost 20 years later, Soviet engineers returned to that task.
But there was a huge abyss between theoretical calculations
and the practical implementation of that gun in its metal form.
To cross that abyss, a bridge, formed of new plants and production standards,
had to be built. As you might know, they successfully crossed that abyss.
In 1940, the MP-10 test mount was installed
at the naval artillery test range in Leningrad for testing gun B-37.
By simply looking at that mount, one could easily imagine
how enormous a battleship turret with three such guns would have been.
The most outstanding part of the gun was its barrel,
which weighed more than 137 tons without its housing.
Two blast furnaces were used simultaneously
for casting blanks to produce the barrel.
Then those gigantic cast slabs were forged on a press
and processed on a huge bench but with a length of around 36 meters.
In general, it took around a year to produce a single barrel.
In terms of being a ballistic solution,
the B-37 gun is one of the best in the world.
It's inferior only to the 460-mm gun of Yamato gun,
but the latter has a larger caliber;
and the US-made MK 7 gun, with its heavy 1,225-kg shells,
is better that the Soviet gun in a number of characteristics.
Basically, it's the third-best gun in the world.
Neither the Englishmen,
nor the French, nor the Italians had a similar gun.
Even the Germans didn't have anything like it.
Performance characteristics of gun B-37.
Caliber: 406 mm. Gun length: 20 meters.
Barrel and breach block mass: almost 137 tons.
Maximum firing range: 45.6 kilometers.
Initial shell velocity: 830 m/s. Firing rate: two shots per minute.
On June 22, 1941, the Soviet Union stood as the world’s largest industrial power.
They had a colossal number of planes, tanks, and money for due to that,
but as soon as World War II started,
all of their forces were destroyed on the Western border.
Leningrad was under siege, Nikolaev was captured,
and a pretty significant amount of industrial power
was lost with the Mariupol armor plant.
It also became apparent
that the war wasn’t going to be fought at sea, but on land,
so all of their forces and supplies
were concentrated on provisioning the land front.
Thus, the battleship construction program was halted.
Despite the fact that no battleships of the Sovetsky Soyuz class were built,
their primary armament still found a purpose in combat,
even though it wasn’t at sea.
During World War II, the MP-10 mount was added to Artillery Battery 1,
the most powerful artillery unit with the longest range in the siege of Leningrad.
Over the time of the city’s defense, the B-37 gun fired a total of 185 shells
at German positions, destroying several artillery batteries,
an ammunition warehouse, and a reinforced concrete command post.
During the offensive operation to liberate Leningrad
that ran from January 15 to 20, 1944, the gun fired 33 shells.
One of the shells hit a power plant building that was occupied by Germans,
razing the building to the ground.
After the war, the Soviet authorities
considered finalizing the construction of Sovetsky Soyuz’s hull,
but came to the realization that the ship didn't correspond
to the post-war reality, primarily because of its AA defenses,
but also because of its secondary armament.
In addition to that, quite a peculiar thing happened,
it was revealed that foreign spies had acquired data
about the primary characteristics of the battleship.
Thus in 1949, the ship was sent for scrapping.
In general, if we analyze the economic situation of that time,
we can say that we couldn't have built 15 battleships by 1946.
Even at the economic development level of that time.
But let's imagine the opposite.
Assume that nothing tragic happened in 1941,
and Sovetsky Soyuz had actually been built…
What would the battleship represent if she had been launched?
She would have been the most state-of-the-art battleship of that time.
These ships could have provided security to the Soviet Union
from all directions at sea.
And furthermore, fight for supremacy in the theater of war of the seas.
One can review the capabilities of battleship Sovetsky Soyuz
as a tactical combat unit, by comparing her
with similar ships being designed in other countries at the time.
The only similar ship that was actually built was Iowa.
The British Lion and German H-class battleships,
like Sovetsky Soyuz, were never built.
With respect to her size and displacement,
Sovetsky Soyuz was larger than the British Lion,
and was comparable with US and German battleships.
However, she had much better armor than other battleships.
Regarding her primary armament,
all of these ships were equipped with nine 406-mm guns,
except for H-39, which should have had eight guns.
The main advantage of the guns installed on Sovetsky Soyuz
was the higher initial shell velocity,
which provided a high degree of armor penetration
and firing accuracy at short and medium distances.
That's extremely important for the conditions of bad visibility
that are quite common for the Baltic and North seas.
Moreover, the firing range of the Soviet guns
was greater compared to the guns of Iowa and Lion.
Taking into account that Sovetsky Soyuz
had been designed primarily to act within boundary waters,
she was inferior to other ships in terms of her speed characteristics.
When you start analyzing the topic in such a manner,
you begin to understand why these battleships were needed,
and that the country was capable of building them,
and also that the design features of these ships
fully corresponded to the situation in the world at that time.
If it weren't for the war, the Soviets would have built at least a single ship.
Possibly even two.
Two ships wouldn't have resolved any geopolitical situations,
but they would at least have been able to cool down some hotheads.
Even though they were never built,
the Sovetsky Soyuz-class battleships greatly influenced
the entire scientific, technical, and production base of the USSR industry.
Brand-new metallurgical industrial sectors appeared, as well as shipyards,
and cities were founded in the fields from the resulting infrastructure.
The experience acquired by engineers working on the battleship project
became the basis of the development of the post-war Soviet Navy.
Those people who worked on Project 23 gained confidence in their abilities
and bravely accepted the challenges of the new technological era.
They went on to successfully create nuclear
and guided missile ocean-going ships in the couple-dozen years that followed.