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This essay has been prepared entirely from unclassified sources. A key document used was the U. S. Navy report Soviet Shipbuilding, published in the hearings of the Sea Power Subcommittee, House Armed Services Committee, 1970, Part 1, p. 9945. In addition, the author relied heavily upon articles in the U. S. and foreign press, the latter including several Russian-language journals that address military and merchant affairs. Ship characteristics are based largely on Flottes de Combat 1972 and Jane’s Fighting Ships 1971-1972.
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The Soviet Union has a large, modern fleet of high-quality warships, supported by the world’s largest ocean research and fishing fleets and, in number of ships, the world’s second largest merchant marine.
This massive Soviet thrust to the sea is essentially the product of the Soviet shipbuilding industry. Like Russian naval history, the Russian shipbuilding chronicle has been, until recently, unimpressive. Yet today, Soviet shipbuilding is a key element in the foreign, economic, and military policies of the Soviet Union.
Although since the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union has been described as the second strongest naval power, only in the past decade has the Soviet Union truly become both a major commercial shipping power and a major designer and builder of ships. Despite the romantic stories of Peter the Great, under the alias of Peter Mikhailoff, working as a shipwright in English and Dutch shipyards in the late 17th century, and his subsequent founding of his own navy, not until the last decade did the Russians devote major resources to ship building and the associated ship design efforts.
There was little Russian naval history until the advent of Peter the Great. He was educated in the German suburb of Moscow and was ingrained with a respect for foreign accomplishments, including the use of seapower. During Peter’s 1693-to-1694 visit to Arkhangelsk on the frigid White Sea, he viewed Russia’s only outlet to the oceans. Encouraged by what he saw, he rapidly enlisted the services of foreign technicians and naval officers, mostly Dutch and Italian and, during the winter of 1695 to 1696, built a fleet at Voronezh, several hundred miles upstream on the Don River. Twenty-eight of these ships, manned mostly by Greeks and commanded by a Swiss, helped Peter gain control of the Sea of Azov. The Russians, however, were unable to gain an outlet on the Black Sea proper. Consequently, Peter turned his interests elsewhere.
Peter visited England and Holland to gain personal knowledge of ship construction and shipyard administration, after which he enlisted some 700 English officers and technicians to help build a navy. The wars with Sweden at the beginning of the 18th century gave Russia an outlet on the Baltic, albeit, on the easternmost point of the Gulf of Finland, at the Neva marshes. Still, Russia now had an opening and Peter moved rapidly, building the new capital of St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) at the mouth of the Neva River. He fortified the neighboring island of Kronstadt, and there, a major naval base was built.
Russian peasants and Western artisans, under the supervision of English and Dutch shipwrights, began building vessels at the mouth of the Neva. The ships built there fought in the battle of Gangut Point on 27 July 1714, which was a major victory over the Swedish Navy.
When Peter died in 1725, the Russians had a powerful Baltic fleet with 48 ships of the line and almost 800 minor warships manned by 28,000 men, many of them seafaring Finns who supplemented the increasing, but still small, number of Russian sailors.
Under subsequent tsars and tsarinas, Russia expanded to the shores of the Black Sea proper and to the Pacific Ocean and its western seas. Russian expansion to these shores was followed by the development of shipyards, some for repair and some for construction.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Russia was the world’s third naval power, behind Britain and France; ahead of Germany, the United States, Japan, Italy, and also the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Nineteen battleships were launched in Russian yards between 1900 and 1915 at four shipyards on the Baltic and three others on the Black Sea. The leading yards were the Baltic Works at the southern tip of Vasilevski Island, St. Petersburg, and the nearby Admiralty yard on Galerny Island. Both built battleships. On the Black Sea, the two yards at Nikolayev (“north” and “south”) and that at Sevastopol also built battleships.
The Russians, however, continued to be seriously dependent upon other nations for design talent, and to a lesser extent, building. For example, the largest battleships built in Russia, the four 23,360-tonners of the Petropavlovsk class laid down in 1909, were based on the designs of Italy’s Vittorio Cuniberti. Major Russian ships built in foreign shipyards during this period include the battleship Tsessarevitch, laid down in France in 1899, the battleship Retvizan, laid down in 1898 in the United States (the Cramp yard in Philadelphia), and the armored cruiser Rurik, laid down in England in 1905. Similarly, the Russians bought five Lake-type submarines built in the United States in 1901-1905, a Holland-type built in the United States in 1904 (with six sister subs being built at the Nevskiy works in St. Petersburg), and three German-built submarines completed about 1907. When World War I broke out, two light cruisers were under construction for the Tsar in Germany. Naturally, they fought the war under German colors.
In 1901, two Russian Navy lieutenants, Kolbasiev and Kuteinov, designed the electric-propelled submarine Piotr Koschka. This craft had limited success and little is known about her. Better known was the inventive team of Chief Constructor Bobonov and Captain Beklemishev. Their Makrel-class submarines of about 150 tons surface displacement were built at the Baltic Works in St. Petersburg from 1904 to 1907, with the intention of shipping them by railway to Vladivostok for assembly and use in that area; one was assembled at the Baltic Works and five others were sent to the Pacific coast to be put together. The 512-ton Krab, begun at Nikolayev in 1908 but not completed until 1915, was the world’s first submarine-minelayer; this craft was designed by a railroad engineer named Naletov in the belief that the Japanese had employed such craft in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905.
Though unharmed by the disastrous war with Japan, Russian shipbuilding was interrupted and then destroyed by World War I and the bloody civil war that followed. By the late 1920s, economic conditions had improved to the point that the first Five Year Plan for economic development was prepared. This plan, which ran from 1 October 1928 to 31 December 1932, provided for the first new-ship construction since the revolution—about a half dozen submarines were provided.
These initial Soviet efforts at submarine construction were the Decembrist and Leninet classes. The former were relatively large craft with a surface displacement of about 900 tons and an overall length of 279 feet. Based on Italian designs, they were completed between 1930 and 1932, probably at the Baltic Works in Leningrad. (Four ships were built, but one sank during exercises in the Gulf of Finland in July 1935; she was raised and may have been returned to service.)
The first Leninets also displaced approximately 900 tons on the surface and were 250 feet long, with later boats being some 280 feet overall. The Leninet class was built at the Leningrad and Nikolayev yards.
Soviet shipbuilders had the use of German submarine plans provided under a Soviet-German naval agreement reached in July 1926. Another possible guide for the Leninet class was the British submarine L-53 which had sunk off Kronstadt island in 1919 and was salvaged by the Soviets in 1928, who sailed her under her British name.
Following the Decembrists and Leninets on the building ways were the Shchuka (originally Liny) class of coastal submarines. There were several series of this class, believed to vary from 575 to 650 tons, surface, and 187 to 197 feet overall.
The lead shipyards for these submarines were the Ordzhonikidze yard in Leningrad and later the new Molotovsk yard near Arkhangelsk on the White Sea. The Ordzhonikidze yard was the former Baltic Works, renamed for Sergei Ordzhonikidze, then chairman of the Economic Council. The Molotovsk yard, honoring V. M. Molotov, the chairman of the Council of Industry and Defense and later foreign minister, was one of nine major yards that would be constructed during the late 1930s and early 1940s to supplement the rehabilitated tsarist yards. The geographical distribution of these new yards was noteworthy, with the Molotovsk yard on the Arctic coast, the Komsomolsk yard on the Amur River, and the Gorkiy yard inland. These would help make the various fleets and flotillas independent of the major and comparatively vulnerable yards on the Baltic and Black Sea coasts.
Still more submarines followed as the Soviets emphasized this form of naval power largely because their hard-pressed industry was yet unable to produce major surface warships. Of particular interest was the mass production of the Malyuka-class submarines. As their name “baby” or “little one” implied, these were small, 160- to 225-ton, 124- to 146-foot craft with a limited radius of action. Their sections were fabricated at the Krasnoye Sormovo Works at Gorkiy, east of Moscow on the Volga River, and then taken by barge to various coastal yards for assembly. This concept of building the submarine components at inland points and then moving them by river and canal to other yards for assembly was used widely in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s, permitting flexibility in development of the nation’s industry.
The second Five Year Plan, which ran from 1933 to 1938, provided the first major surface warships to be constructed by the Soviets. First came the Leningrad class of large destroyers or “leaders” (2,225 tons standard, 418 feet). These ships, six in number, resembled the contemporary French Tigre-class contretor-pilleurs, giving evidence of the French assistance in their design. The lead ships were begun in 1933 and 1934 at the Ordzhonikidze yard in Leningrad, with the last ships of this class being completed in 1940.
In 1934 and 1935, the Soviets began their first cruisers, the Kirov class, each armed with nine 7.1-inch guns (7,600 tons standard, 627 feet). Six of these ships were begun between 1934 and 1939, all being named for Communist revolutionaries: the Kirov and Maxim Gorkiy at the Ordzhonikidze yard in Leningrad, the Molotov and Voroshilov at Nikolayev on the Black Sea, and the Kaganovitch and Kalinin at Komsomolsk on the Amur River in Soviet Siberia. The first two ships were completed during 1939 and 1940; completion of the other four was delayed until after World War II.
The Italian firm of Ansaldo in Genoa provided design and technical direction for the construction of these cruisers, which were similar in appearance to their Italian contemporaries. This assistance, coupled with French design support in the case of the destroyers, demonstrated the Soviet reliance on foreign technical skills. During this period, the Soviets also obtained German technical assistance, especially in the areas of military aviation, tank, munition development and production, and submarine design.
Still another manifestation of the continuing Soviet dependence on foreign ship technology came in 1937, when the Soviets asked the United States for battleship and carrier plans, and were inquiring into the possibilities of having battleships constructed in U. S. shipyards. The Soviet naval position was not helped by the purges of the late 1930s, which included the liquidation of hundreds of naval officers, including Admiral V. M. Orlov, the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, the commanders-in-chief of the Baltic, Black Sea, and Northern fleets, and Admiral R. Muklevich, head of the Naval Construction Department.
The bloody purges did not weaken Stalin’s desire for the Soviet Union to become a major seapower. Witness the 1938 declaration by Michael Kalinin, chairman of the Presidium of the Soviet Union, that “England, the United States, Japan, France, Germany, and Italy, all are concentrating on their fleets. We must have before us the goal of surpassing all these countries.” However, calling for a navy “second to none” and building the ships for it are different matters. The shortage of shipbuilding capacity was given attention by the 18th Communist Party Congress which in March 1939, while discussing “the most important construction work” for the third Five Year Plan, called upon the government to “. . . accelerate the construction of shipyards already begun for the building of ships for the high-seas fleet.”
A year later, Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov, recently elevated to command of the Soviet Navy, declared that “. . . the number of ships built annually is insufficient. It is imperative that their quality be improved and their construction period be shortened.”
The keels were laid in 1939 and 1940 for two 45,000-ton battleships, two 35,000-ton battle cruisers, six or more Chapayev-class light cruisers, and many lesser warships. The battleships were started at Ordzhonikidze in Leningrad and at the south yard at Nikolayev, battle cruisers at Leningrad’s Admiralty yard and at the north yard in Nikolayev, and the light cruisers at all four yards. The German invasion of June 1941 delayed or destroyed all of these ships, and only five of the light cruisers would be completed after the war.
The five Chapayevs, of 11,000 tons standard displacement, would have a dozen 5.9-inch guns in triple turrets on a hull 665 feet long. Like the Kirovs, they would resemble Italian cruisers, with large, widely-spaced upright funnels, a large foretower, and a tripod mainmast stepped just forward of the second funnel.
With a world-wide conflict beginning in Europe, the Soviet Union was briefly in alliance with Nazi Germany. The result was increased German technical assistance to the Soviet Navy, culminating in the German sale of the unfinished heavy cruiser Lützow to the Soviets in 1940. Her sister ship, the Prinz Eugen, which later came into American hands, had a displacement of 14,800 tons and mounted eight 8-inch guns. The Soviets did little work on the ex-Lützow before the German assault in June 1941; she served as the floating battery Tallinn in the Baltic in 1942 and was renamed Petropavlovsk in 1944, but was never completed. (The unfinished Seydlitz of this class was scuttled by the Germans in April 1945 at Königsberg, salvaged by the Russians and renamed Poltava, but she was never completed, either.)
When Germany attacked Russia in June 1941, the Soviet shipyards had completed the following warships in the decade and a half that their yards were operational: two cruisers, 21 destroyers, 15 torpedo boats (small destroyers), and approximately 220 submarines. Thus, they had built only a modest number of surface ships, but the world’s largest submarine fleet.
Although the Soviet Navy was far below the war strength planned by Stalin, the official History of the Great Fatherland War of the Soviet Union 1941-1945, published in 1965, gives the impression that the sea forces available were sufficient for the tasks:
Despite the fact that the war which began did not make it possible to complete the program of the reconstruction of our Naval Fleet which had been planned by the Communist Party and the Soviet Government, it had at its disposal the forces and equipment necessary for the performance of the missions assigned to it. The surface ships and the submarines which had been constructed in the pre-war years corresponded fully to the requirements of that time, and in terms of their combat and technical characteristics were not inferior to ships of foreign fleets of the same types.
During the four years of war, there was little ship construction. The main shipbuilding centers of Leningrad and Nikolayev were inactive, as in the north German troops besieged Leningrad for almost three years, and in the south they captured almost all the Black Sea coast. The inland industries that escaped the German invasion were engaged in making land and air weapons; hence few ship or submarine components were made for the yards on the Arctic and Pacific coasts. The German destruction of Soviet yards on the Black Sea were severe; according to the Russian book The Hydronauts (published in 1964):
The ports of the Black Sea, Baltic Sea, and the Sea of Azov, as well as basins of rivers and lakes to the west of the Volga, had been reduced to such ruin and destruction by the enemy as history has never known in any previous war. In the process of falling back, the enemy blew up berths, moles, and lighthouses, scuttled vessels in harbors and roadsteads, mined entrances to channels and port structures, dumped steam locomotives, cars, cranes, and hoist lifts into the water and blasted multispan bridges . . . .
Victory in Europe found the Soviet shipbuilding industry at a virtual standstill except for submarine construction. Submarines of the “S” (Stalinets), “Shch” (Shchuka), and “M” (Malutka) types were built in the immediate postwar years. There was some compensation for the destruction of Soviet shipyards in the war booty that the Soviets took from the Germans. The shipyard at Königsberg now was in Russian territory (renamed Kaliningrad); Soviet specialists and troops combed through the wreckage of German shipyards, removing machinery, equipment, plans, and most important, technicians; warships, including the unfinished carrier Graf Zeppelin, ten completed U-boats, and components of other submarines were transferred to the Soviets after the war. The submarines included four Type XXI high-speed, long-range U-boats. The Type XXI submarines and German development of the Walther hydrogen-peroxide turbine submarine were of particular interest to the Soviets.
Despite the minor contribution of the Soviet Navy to winning the war, the Navy did obtain sufficient political support to return the shipyards to operation. Soviet naval policy for the post-war years was announced on 28 July 1945, when Premier Stalin declared: “The Soviet People wish to see their fleet grow still stronger and more powerful. Our people are constructing new battleships and bases for the fleet.”
Major Soviet Shipyards*
Yard | Location | Became | Type of Construction |
SEVERODVINSK (ex-Molotovsk) | Arctic | 1930s | naval only (submarines) |
SUDOMEKH | Baltic | 1930s | naval only (submarines) |
KALININGRAD | Baltic | 1930s | naval and merchant (escorts, amphibious, trawlers) |
PETROVSKIY | Baltic | 1930s | naval only (minor combatants) |
ZHDANOV | Baltic | 1930s | naval and merchant (cruisers, destroyers, merchant) |
ADMIRALTY (ex-Marti, ex-Putilov) | Baltic | 1900 | naval and merchant (submarines, icebreakers, merchant) |
BALTIC (ex-Ordzhonikidze) | Baltic | 1856 | naval and merchant (primarily merchant; some naval auxiliaries) |
KLAIPEDA | Baltic | 1950s | merchant only |
VYBORG | Baltic | 1960s | merchant only |
NIKOLAYEV NOSENKO (southern) | Black | 1899 | naval and merchant (helicopter carriers, auxiliary, merchant) |
NIKOLAYEV NORTHERN | Black | 1800 | naval and merchant (destroyers, merchant) |
KERCH (KAMYSH-BURUN) | Black | 1930s | naval and merchant (minor combatants, merchant |
KHERSON | Black | 1950s | merchant only |
OKTYABR’SKOYE | Black | 1950s | merchant only |
KHABAROVSK | Pacific | 1950s | naval only (escorts, minor combatants) |
KOMSOMOLSK (Leninskaya Komsomola) | Pacific | 1930s | naval and merchant (submarines, destroyers, icebreakers, merchant) |
GORKIY (Krasnoye Sormovo) | Inland | 1940s | naval and merchant (submarines, hydrofoils, inland and river craft) |
ZELENODOLSK | Inland | 1940s | naval and merchant (minor combatants, hydrofoils, merchant) |
* See map, pages 162-163, for the locations of these shipyards.
The four unfinished Kirov-class cruisers, five of the Chapayev-class light cruisers, 14 Otlichniy-class destroyers, as well as a few smaller surface warships were completed after the war. Working in close, albeit suspicious, coordination with captured German engineers, the Soviets developed new ship designs. Then, beginning in 1950, Soviet shipyards began launching the large Sverdlov-class light cruisers, the fast destroyers of the new Skoryi class, and smaller ships of various kinds. All were conventional warship designs. There is some evidence that construction began on two of a planned class of 44,000-ton battleships or battle cruisers, but, in any event, little work was accomplished on them.
Underwater, the Soviet designers and shipyards—drawing heavily on German assistance—displayed more advanced concepts. First came the W-class submarines, 1,050-ton surface displacement, 250-foot ships, based on Type XXI U-boat technology. (In the postwar era, all new Soviet submarine classes are identified by NATO code names as are nearly all surface combatants after the Skoryi class; NATO code names for major surface warships begin with the letter “K”.) The W-class submarines had a surface speed of 18½ knots and an underwater speed of about 13½ knots, only a little slower than the Type XXI boats, although the Russian craft are almost 600 tons lighter. Many of the W-class submarines were built at the inland Gorkiy shipyard and transported on floating docks via rivers and canals to coastal yards for outfitting.
Perhaps the most impressive factor about the W-class program was its size: 235 submarines of this class are believed to have been completed between 1950 and 1957, with Soviet statements being made to the effect that the rate of production reached about 90 per year before halting about 1957. Even while the W-boats were being pushed out of yards throughout the Soviet Union, an estimated 26 improved Z-class submarines were built to an improved and faster W/XXI design.
During the early 1950s, production began on an estimated 30 Q-class coastal submarines. Reportedly, these were 650-ton, 185-foot submarines with three shafts. Some of these submarines apparently had their center shaft turned by a closed-cycle propulsion system developed in part from German research efforts. They encountered numerous difficulties as Soviet engineers and scientists struggled with their complex machinery that produced oxygen for the underwater operation of a diesel engine. The system reportedly could produce underwater speeds of 20 knots (when it worked). Subsequently, the troublesome closed-cycle propulsion was removed and the Q-class submarines operated only on conventional diesel-electric propulsion.
Unquestionably the Soviets also initiated efforts in nuclear propulsion at this time, but were far behind the United States when the USS Nautilus (SSN-571), the world’s first nuclear-powered ship, signaled “Underway on nuclear propulsion” on 17 January 1955. That same year Nikita Khrushchev consolidated his power over the Soviet Union and took action that would mark him as the political father of the Soviet nuclear submarine. He dismissed Fleet Admiral Nikolai G. Kuznetsov, who had served as head of the Navy from 1939 to 1947 and again from 1951 to 1955. Admiral Kuznetsov, a “big ship” advocate, had directed the Soviet naval expansion on the eve of World War II and again in the postwar years.
Premier Khrushchev declared that the cruisers being built were “sitting ducks, fit only for carrying diplomatic missions to foreign countries,” and otherwise criticized the Red Navy both in public and in private. Kuznetsov was out and Admiral Sergei G. Gorshkov was in. The new Soviet naval chief had been a river flotilla commander during the war and was known for his staff work and ingenuity. He turned the Soviet Union’s shipyards and naval search facilities toward building nuclear submarines and naval missiles.
The first nuclear-powered ship in the Soviet Union, however, was icebreaker, not a submarine. The keel for the 16,000-ton nuclear-powered icebreaker Lenin was laid on 25 August 1956, at the Admiralty Shipyard in Leningrad. Launched into the Neva River on 5 December 1957, the Lenin is the world’s largest and most-powerful icebreaker, with four turbo-generators, driving three electric motors. Three nuclear reactors generate steam for the turbo-generators. Although the propulsion of a large surface ship was less complex than cramming a nuclear plant into a submarine hull, the Lenin’s completion lagged about a year behind schedule and she did not get underway until 14 September 1959. Subsequently, according to a U. S. government spokesman, she has encountered operational problems. Still, she was the first nuclear surface ship, predating the merchant ship Savannah and the guided missile cruiser USS Long Beach (CGN-9), the first two U. S. surface ships to have nuclear propulsion.
Construction of the first Soviet nuclear-powered submarines began at the Severodvinsk yard near Arkhangelsk on the White Sea. This was formerly the Molotovsk yard, renamed after Molotov fell from favor in 1949.
In 1959 or 1960, the Soviets completed their first nuclear-powered N-class, submarine at Severodvinsk. Unlike the U. S. Navy’s prototypes, the Nautilus and USS Seawolf (SSN-575), the Soviet N-class submarines were production craft, with three and then another three believed to have been constructed simultaneously. Even while the N-class attack submarines were still on the building ways—which are enclosed to permit year-around work in the White Sea cold—the Soviets began construction of nuclear-powered cruise and ballistic missile submarines. (In comparison, the U. S. Navy did not begin its first and only nuclear cruise missile submarine until the Nautilus had been at sea for almost 2½ years and the first U. S. ballistic missile submarine was not started until eight months after that.)
By 1960, the H-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines were being built at Severodvinsk and E-class cruise missile nuclear submarines were being built at Komsomolsk, about 280 miles up the Amur River from where it enters the Tartar Strait. The latter was the second Soviet shipyard to display a nuclear submarine production capability. (The Admiralty yard’s nuclear icebreaker was not immediately followed by submarine construction.)
During the early 1960s, the Soviet Navy, comprised largely of postwar ships and submarines, was considered the second largest afloat, second on the surface only to the U. S. Navy and unequaled underwater. During this period, the submarine force reached a peak strength of more than 400 ships, all but a few of which were of postwar design and construction.
Admiral Gorshkov’s efforts to give the Soviet Union a surface/missile navy second to none began to show results as new and advanced surface warship designs began to appear in the early 1960s: The Kashin-class anti-aircraft missile frigates, the first of which went to sea in 1962 are still the world’s largest warships propelled by gas turbines and are more heavily armed and faster than the larger U. S. Spruance class destroyers now under construction; the Kynda-class cruise-missile cruisers were built about the same time and, although only the size of contemporary Western “destroyers,” have eight launchers for the long-range Shaddock missile; next appeared the Kresta-I-class cruisers, combining the Shaddock launchers with more-potent anti-aircraft missile and ASW capabilities; and they were followed by the Kresta-II-class cruisers with the basic Kresta hull carrying newer, but shorter-ranged, surface-to-surface missiles, newer surface-to-air missile systems, and more advanced electronics.
At this writing, the latest Soviet surface warship seen in Western waters is the Krivak-class missile destroyer, the prototype of which was completed in 1970. On a hull only some 400 feet long and displacing about 3,500 tons full load, the Krivak carries four large surface-to-surface missiles, probably two launchers for anti-aircraft missiles, two 12-barrel antisubmarine rocket launchers, eight torpedo tubes, and four 76-mm. guns in twin-gun houses. These ships have hull-mounted sonar, variable depth sonar trailed astern, and an impressive array of radars. With gas-turbine propulsion, the Krivak class probably represents the smallest, most versatile, and best equipped “destroyer” afloat today. Large-scale construction of these ships is expected to replace the Soviet Navy’s “old” destroyers that were built during the 1950s.
[maps: “Rough plan of Severodvinsk” and “Leningrad and Environs”]
If the Krivak missile destroyer is the latest Soviet surface warship to be observed at sea it will soon not be the last. The Zhdanov shipyard in Leningrad continues to produce missile cruisers and it appears only a matter of time before a follow-on to the Kresta II emerges. More of a mystery is the ship now under construction at the Nikolayev Nosenko (southern) yard which produced the hybrid missile cruiser/helicopter carriers Moskva and Leningrad.
In January 1972, a number of newspaper articles appeared describing “the largest surface ship ever built in the Soviet Union” being under construction at Nikolayev. Some accounts said that some U. S. military analysts believed the ship might be the first “aircraft carrier” to be built in the Soviet Union.
Apparently a ship of some 30,000 tons displacement is under construction, about the size of a U. S. Essex-class aircraft carrier. If indeed she is a “flat-top,” the ship probably would operate helicopters and vertical/short take-off and landing aircraft rather than conventional fixed-wing planes. The Soviets are known to have developed a number of V/STOL combat aircraft. Thus, the new Soviet ship—if a carrier—may well be something like the American “sea control ship” concept rather than an attack carrier. Other possibilities for the Nikolayev hull include a container ship or super-tanker.
Soviet shipyards have been even more prolific in turning out small combatants—patrol craft, minesweepers, torpedo-boats, and missile boats, the last including the well-known Komar and Osa types, and the larger Nanuchka class of about 800 tons which presents more of an open-sea missile threat to allied ships than the Komars and Osas.
And, to support these fighting ships, Soviet yards have produced many tenders and replenishment ships (which are supplemented by foreign-built auxiliaries).
For the Soviet submarine force the Red yards have turned out no less than five new submarine designs in the past few years: the nuclear-powered V and C classes, similar to each other in size, with the V-class being armed with torpedoes and the C-class with an underwater-launched, anti-ship missile; the Y-class akin to U. S. Polaris submarines (possibly with two nuclear reactors, producing an estimated 60,000 horsepower); the B-class submarines, which probably are diesel-powered boats, possible for training; and an A-class of submarine. U. S. officials apparently cannot determine whether the last-named class has nuclear or “conventional” propulsion according to statements in Congressional hearings.
The main Soviet thrust underwater has been toward nuclear propulsion. In 1970, Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover told the Congress that:
. . . as late as 1966 the Russians had only two new construction yards building nuclear submarines [Severodvinsk and Komsomolsk]; today they have four and possibly five with this capability. Even though this tremendous submarine building capability has not been fully utilized in the last year it has produced some 12 submarines . . . . The lead in nuclear submarines we have so long enjoyed has just about disappeared.
The additional yards that now have a nuclear submarine-building capability probably include the Gorkiy yard (reported by The New York Times to be constructing C-class missile submarines), and either or both the Admiralty and Sudomekh yards in Leningrad.
Soviet shipyards now are turning out 12 to 15 nuclear submarines per year; they can produce 20 a year, including several Y-class ballistic missile type, on a one-shift basis. In contrast, U. S. shipyards are now completing four or five nuclear submarines a year and even with three shifts working, could build only five or six annually until the Poseidon conversion program is completed in three or four years. According to Admiral Rickover, the Severodvinsk yard alone has a greater construction capability than all U. S. submarine-building yards combined. Apparently, it takes two years to build a Y-class, about the same length of time it took U. S. yards to build a similar ship when they were doing such work.
During the winter of 1970 and 1971, the Soviets apparently attained parity with the U. S. Navy in nuclear submarines. By about 1975, the Soviets—at current production rates—could have some 160 nuclear submarines compared to a U. S. strength of about 110. Soviet strength could increase even more dramatically if Red shipyards produced their one-shift capability of 20 ships a year or went to three shifts, which could provide about 40 nuclear submarines annually.
Admiral Rickover has said of Soviet nuclear submarines that:
. . . from what we have been able to learn during the past year, the Soviets have attained equality in a number of characteristics (weapons, speed, depth, crew performance) and superiority in some.
Of particular significance has been the revelation during the past few years that Soviet submarines are significantly faster in submerged speed than most U. S. nuclear submarines.
The Soviet Union is also a leading builder of commercial ships. However, Soviet shipyards currently provide less than one-half of the nation’s merchant and fishing tonnages. Even though Soviet yards produced some 400 merchant ships (3-million deadweight tons) in the five years between 1966 and 1970, inclusive, (as well as warships and fishing craft), some 60 to 70% of the merchant ships and 50 to 65% of the fishing ships built for the Soviet Union are built in the yards of Communist Poland, East Germany, and Yugoslavia, and, to a lesser extent, in Bulgaria, Romania, and Finland, and in non-Communist nations such as Denmark, France, Great Britain, Japan, Sweden, and West Germany. In 1970, a Congressional committee estimated that world-wide, almost one-fourth of all commercial ships under construction were on order for the Soviet Union.
Ironically, the Soviet yards also construct merchant and fishing ships for export as well as domestic use, permitting the yards to maintain a very high degree of technical sophistication in these fields (possibly beyond immediate Soviet requirements) and bring foreign exchange into the country. This is in marked contrast to the U. S. shipbuilding industry which builds very few ships for non-American use. The first Soviet-built commercial ships intended for export probably were two small tankers built at Leningrad for East Germany m 1959; a few additional merchant ships were built for Soviet bloc nations and some trawlers were delivered to Ceylon and Ghana in the early 1960s. Then in 1965, the Soviets agreed to provide 40 cargo liners, reefers, bulk carriers, and trawlers to a Greek firm. This was the start of Soviet yards supplying large numbers of commercial ships to both Communist and non-Communist nations.
This Soviet interest in commercial shipbuilding is evidenced by the fact that four of the five major shipyards built in the Soviet Union after World War II, build only merchant and fishing vessels. (See at top of next page.)
About half of the efforts of the 18 major shipyards are devoted to naval programs. The capability of these yards and of Soviet ship designers and laboratories has been dramatically demonstrated during the past decade by the quantity and quality of warships built. The current Soviet shipbuilding techniques provide for naval and merchant ships that are highly standardized and designed to facilitate production. These features are encouraged by a separate design team for each ship category, usually located at or near the lead yard for the type.
Soviet ship designers and draftsmen have become specialized and have thus gained intimate knowledge of specific ship types, such as minesweepers or destroyers. According to a recent U. S. Navy report on Soviet Shipyards, “although their designs are noted for simplicity of operation and maintenance, they are capable of very sophisticated concepts and have made great achievements in the fields of automation and manpower savings.”
Major Soviet Shipyard Development
| Naval Ships | Naval and | Merchant Ships |
First Generation | — | 4 | — |
Second Generation | 3 | 6 | — |
Third Generation | 1 | — | 4 |
Supporting the shipyards and design offices are numerous scientific research institutes under the control of the Ministry of Shipbuilding Production. The Ministry is responsible for all shipbuilding yards of significant size and for related research and development. Thus, the Ministry designs and constructs ships for the Navy and the other users such as the merchant, research, fishing, and river transport fleets. Each aspect of ship design, shipbuilding, and weapons systems development has its own research institute. There are separate institutes for hydrodynamics and ship construction, welding, turbines, boilers, electronics, underwater weapons, naval missiles and the like.
The results of this emphasis on research and development may be seen in the Soviet advances in hydrofoil craft, air cushion vehicles, shipboard automation, gas turbine propulsion plants, high-speed nuclear submarines, and automated welding. When one looks at the many advanced surface warship and nuclear submarine classes that have gone to sea in the past decade, the extensive resources allocated to naval power in this period appear to have been fully justified.
The U. S. Navy report observed that:
. . . in formulating a judgment on U.S.S.R. progress in automation of production . . . most of the publicized innovations are related to yards doing merchant work of a far more open nature and considerably lower priority than Soviet naval work and it can therefore be presumed that in yards engaged in high priority work on naval ships, the facilities, equipment and technology are at least equal and probably superior . . . .
All new shipbuilding equipment, whether a simple hand tool or a computer-controlled cutting machine, must perform to the satisfaction of the Ministry of Shipbuilding before it is introduced into the industry as a standard item. The equipment then can be expected to appear shortly at all major yards having a use for it and later at the smaller yards.
Major advanced equipment in use at Red shipyards includes automated steel plate treatment lines to clean scale and rust, plate-and-shape hot-cutting machines operating on a photo-electric cell principal and others operating from digital computer programs, and automatic welding machines (with extensive use of CO2 shielding).
To take full advantage of the increased rate of material flow from automated and improved methods of processing and fabricating steel, Soviet shipbuilders have adopted techniques for reducing ways time, thereby increasing the number of ships built without increasing the number of building ways. Off-ways assembly of complete hull sections was exploited in the early 1950s for series production of diesel-electric submarines, especially the W-class boats. Soviet shipbuilders assembled these diesel-electric submarines in a floating dry-dock in three or four months, and apparently completed their fitting-out in another floating dock in an additional two months. These operations suggest either docks with extremely sensitive ballasting systems or docks which can be rested on submerged foundations.
Number of Major Shipyards *
| TYPE OF SHIPS BUILT |
| |||
| Naval | Naval & | Merchant Ships | (Nuclear | Total |
United States | 5 | 13 | 2 | (4) | 234,000 |
Soviet Union | 4 | 10 | 4 | (4 or 5) | 265,000 |
Other Nations | 8 | 37 | 32 | (4) | — |
* Over 2,000 employees each. There are many smaller ones, of course, in all maritime countries.
** Included in previous categories. The current U. S. nuclear submarine construction yards are: General Dynamics/Electric Boat, Newport News Ship Building, Litton/Ingalls, and Mare Island Naval Shipyard; the “other nation” nuclear submarine construction yards are: Cherbourg Naval Dockyard, France; Vickers and Cammell Laird, England; and a Chinese yard that is reported to have completed its first nuclear-powered submarine in 1971.
Another technique is used by the Nosenko shipyard at Nikolayev on the Black Sea, a former submarine yard, to produce refrigerated fish-factory ships of 4,000-ton displacement. Nine blocks, each weighing 200 to 360 tons, are assembled into sections at three positions, with machinery and other components being installed before transfer of the sections to the final hull assembly line. The final hull assembly shed at Nosenko can handle several ships simultaneously as they progress from the section assembly area down the line toward a floodable basin. The ships are virtually complete after only three months on the ways.
An example of sectional construction for very large ships is to be found at the old Baltic (ex-Ordzhonikidze) facility, where ways time for the 50,000-deadweight-ton Sofiya-class tankers was reduced from six months to 3½ months on the first ship assembled by the new method. In conjunction with sectional construction, Soviet yards are employing the technique of afloat welding. Although this is a regular practice in many nations using a caisson arrangement to permit welding of ship sections, the Soviets hermetically seal the sections and lock them with pins for one-sided welding from inside the hull while the ships are afloat.
The Soviets employ a number of techniques to permit level-position construction of ships with a moving transverser—either floating or on rails—to move ships to flooding basins or launching ways and docks. This permits the Soviet shipbuilding industry to erect some 90% of its ships on level assembly positions, eliminating the inefficiencies associated with building ships on inclined ways. Other benefits from these techniques include more economical use of shipyard space, expansion of shipbuilding capacity without requiring additional shoreline, and—for many reasons—lesser shipbuilding costs than constructing ships on conventional shipways or in floodable building docks. (Side-launching techniques are employed with some transversers because of space restrictions in adjacent waterways.)
In marked contrast, virtually all ships built in the United States are constructed on conventional shipways or in floodable docks. The first U. S. ship erected and launched on a transverser submerging dock system was the containership Austral Envoy, which floated free at the modern Ingalls/Litton yard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, on 26 June 1971.
The only other U. S. yard which assembles ships in the horizontal position, employing advanced construction techniques with side launching, is the Avondale Shipyard in New Orleans, Louisiana, builder of the Knox-class Navy escort ships and Hamilton-class Coast Guard cutters.
The Soviet attention to details in ship construction, such as outer and inner building way scaffolding is also significant. The use of light, easy-to-knock-down, tubular scaffolds and movable or hanging structures to replace stationary way scaffolds cuts both material costs for rolled metal shapes and lumber, and the time required to erect and dismantle the scaffolding.
The Soviet drive toward standardization and mass production in shipyards has not destroyed their ability to build small numbers of highly specialized ships. This flexibility has been retained at the first-generation Baltic yard, which builds the large Sofiya-class tankers and the recently-completed Kosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the largest Soviet space event support ship, at the Admiralty yard which built the nuclear icebreaker Lenin and the large fish factory-support ship Vostok; and at the Nikolayev Nosenko yard which built the two Moskva-class helicopter carriers.
In comparison to U. S. and certain other foreign shipyards, most Soviet shipbuilding facilities are small. The U. S. Navy study stated, however, that this is a drawback only if one assumes that the Soviets wish to construct naval or merchant ships considerbly [sic] larger than their newest combatant ships and cargo carriers. However, the Soviets are demonstrating their ability to overcome even this limitation: In early 1971, news reached the West of completion of design work on a supertanker with a deadweight of 150,000 tons. According to an official Soviet statement, “. . . the rapid development of the world’s oil-extracting and oil-refining industries has brought about a sharp increase in the seaborne trade in crude oil.” Reportedly, design already has begun on a class of 180,000-ton-deadweight tankers to follow the 150,000-tonners on Soviet shipways.
The first of the 150,000-ton tankers, to be named Krim was laid down at the Kerch Shipyard on the Crimean peninsula early in 1972.
After World War II, the Soviet Union retained a large satellite empire in Eastern Europe that included Poland, East Germany, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all maritime-oriented. While Soviet yards concentrated on warship construction, the satellite shipyards were directed to produce merchantmen and fishing ships for the Soviet Union. Although this directive was decried by some in the satellite countries, it still meant Soviet backing for the rehabilitation of their shipyards. For example, the devastation to Poland’s three shipyards was estimated at 70 to 90% when the war ended. Rebuilding began shortly, and on 3 April 1948, the Gdansk Shipyard in Poland laid the keel for the first postwar Polish ship, a 2,540-dwt-ton coal and ore carrier. By mid-1970, the three Polish shipyards had completed more than a thousand ships. Today, many of these ships—merchant, fishing, naval auxiliary, and amphibious—fly the Soviet flag; but Polish-built ships also sail under 22 other foreign flags and form the core of the Polish merchant marine. The situation has been repeated in other satellite nations.
In order to summarize the Soviet shipbuilding capability objectively, a list was made of the various management and production practices that are generally accepted as integral parts of any modern efficient shipbuilding operations. The extent of Soviet adherence to each practice was then estimated . . . .
Thus begins the concluding paragraph of the U. S. Navy report. The Soviets were given high marks in:
► overcoming demands for custom ships;
► cost/benefit analysis of facility improvements;
► dynamic training programs;
► standardization of components;
► total yard integration of mechanization and automation;
► series production of standard ships;
► freedom from weather constraints;
► reduced labor intensity;
► advanced ship design;
► attention to tolerances and standards;
► production oriented supervisory and labor personnel.
The report listed no modern management or production practices in its category of “not used to any significant extent.” Some practices, however, were not observed to a significant degree. Thus, valid reasons appear for the report’s conclusion that “. . . continued Soviet adherence to nearly all of these principals [sic] . . . leads to the conclusion that they have established a very strong and viable shipbuilding capability.”
[signed] Norman Polmar