What you need to know: The Soviet Union had ambitious plans to build a powerful aircraft carrier fleet, but never fully achieved these goals. Despite attempts dating back to the 1920s, projects like Izmail, Project 71and the supercarrier Ulyanovsk The project remained incomplete due to competing military priorities and economic constraints.

-Soviet leaders like Stalin and Khrushchev prioritized ground and air forces, as well as nuclear weapons, over carriers. Although hybrid ships like Moskva And kyiv emerged, they lacked real transport capabilities.

-The only completed Soviet aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsovcontinues to serve in the Russian Navy, a vestige of the USSR’s unrealized naval aspirations.

Soviet aircraft carrier dreams: plans, failures and lessons learned

The Soviet Union was one of the largest and most industrialized countries the world had ever known. Yet for all its engineering talents and manufacturing capability, in the seventy-four years of the USSR’s existence it never fielded a real aircraft carrier. The country, however, had several projects to build them and was working on a real carrier, the Ulyanovskat the end of the Cold War.

After the Communist victory in 1917, science and engineering came to the forefront in the attempt to modernize Russia and the other Soviet republics. The military was no exception and devoted its resources to then-advanced technologies such as tanks, airborne forces, and land and air rockets. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was linked to several promising projects, including the first effort, Izmail.

In 1927, Soviet leaders approved plans to build an aircraft carrier by converting the Imperial Russian Navy’s unfinished battlecruiser. Izmailunder construction since 1913, as a full-length aircraft carrier. Completed as a battlecruiser, Izmail was expected to displace thirty-five thousand tons, making it similar in displacement (and same decade) to that of the US Navy. Lexington-class interwar carriers which carried up to seventy-eight aircraft.

Unfortunately for the new Soviet navy, IzmailThe conversion was never completed and the ship was eventually broken up. If the idea of ​​a Soviet carrier had its supporters, others, including the brilliant young Marshal Tukhachevskypointed out that no matter how great the Soviet Union was, it could not afford to build both an army and a navy to match its more powerful neighbors. Tukhachevsky was right, and the Navy took a back seat to the ambitions of the Red Army (and the Air Force). This was a strategic dilemma that the Soviets inherited from the tsars and persisted until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – a dilemma that still affects the Russian government today.

The Soviet Union under Stalin came to measure economic and agricultural production within five-year plans, and in 1938, as part of the Third Five-Year Plan, laid the foundations for a pair of aircraft carriers. The so-called “Project 71” class would be based on the Chapaev-class cruisersdisplacing thirteen thousand tons and having a 630-foot flight deck. The carriers would each carry fifteen fighters and thirty torpedo bombers, including one assigned to the Baltic Fleet and one to the Pacific Fleet. The aircraft carriers were approved in 1939 but were never completed, their construction interrupted by World War II. A second project for a heavier twenty-two thousand ton carrier was proposed but construction never even began.

In the mid-1940s, when the Soviet Union was engaged in a life-and-death struggle against Nazi Germany, another carrier concept was proposed. “Project 72” was described as similar to the previous carrier project but, at thirty thousand tons, more than twice as large. Another similar design was Kostromitinov projectwhich weighed forty thousand tons and would have been equipped with sixty-six fighters, forty torpedo bombers and, unusually, sixteen 152 millimeter cannons. This suggests that the carrier could have been used to support amphibious landings in Scandinavia or the Baltics if it had ever been built. While the Soviet Union had always been a land power for which land warfare had to take precedence over maritime warfare, the war situation of 1943 made it clear that resources could not be taken away from the Red Army to build a gateway -aircraft of doubtful utility.

In the war’s aftermath, with the Red Army the dominant land power in Eurasia, the Soviet Navy again pushed for more aircraft carriers. The naval staff wanted a force of fifteen carriersnine large and six small, divided between the Pacific and Northern fleets, with six of the large carriers allocated to the Pacific and the remainder to the Northern Fleet. Stalin, however, did not want aircraft carriers, preferring to rely on battleships and cruisers. Soviet industry covered for Stalin, explaining that it did not yet have the capacity to build new types of ships.

Nikita Khrushchev succeeded him in 1953, but despite Khrushchev’s new ideas in the era of missile warfare, the best the Soviet Navy could get out of him was a single light aircraft carrier. The aircraft carrier, Project 85, would displace only twenty-eight thousand tons and carry forty navalized MiG-19 fighters. This project was also canceled before work even began.

In 1962, the USSR began construction of two aircraft carriers at the Nikolayev Shipyards in Ukraine. THE two carriers, Moskva And Leningradwere compromise ships, with the forward half resembling a conventional guided-missile cruiser and the rear half consisting of a flight deck, hangar, and elevator that transported aircraft between the two. The Moskva class was likely designed to hunt American and British Polaris guided-missile submarines operating near Soviet waters.

Each Moskva ship carried up to a dozen anti-submarine warfare helicopters, but otherwise lacked offensive weaponry.

The Moskva class was followed in the 1970s and 1980s by the kyiv coursewhich had a similar mission, but the United States was about to deploy the even longer-range Trident missile. This meant that the Soviet Navy would have to operate even further from its territorial waters and potentially confront U.S. Navy aircraft carriers. As a result, the Kievs had offensive weaponry in the form of SS-N-12 “Sandbox” anti-ship missiles, each capable of carrying a 350-kiloton nuclear warhead. Four Kievs were built, with a fifth authorized but never completed.

The mid-1980s were a period of major expansion for the Soviet Navy, including aircraft carriers. The USSR began construction of two fifty-thousand-ton class aircraft carriers and a nuclear-powered supercarrier, Ulyanovskthis was almost on par with the American Nimitz-class carriers. Of the three superships, only one was completed before the end of the Cold War. The completed aircraft carrier was inherited by the Russian Navy, with which it still serves today as Admiral Kuznetsov. The incomplete aircraft carrier was purchased by Chinese interests, who passed it on to the People’s Liberation Army Navy, where it was refitted and commissioned as an aircraft carrier. Liaoning in 2012. Ulyanovsk was scrapped by Ukraine, which inherited the unfinished hull after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

As a land power, the Soviet Union was never able to allocate enough resources to the country to build a true aircraft carrier fleet. There has always been another perfectly reasonable – and eminently practical – way to spend the country’s rubles, whether on the army or the air force, and later on nuclear weapons. Even today, the Russian Navy’s non-strategic forces face stiff competition from land and air forces, and the future of Russian naval aviation is once again at stake. cloudy at best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOY2nwQXLEO

About the Author: Kyle Mizokami, Defense Expert

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national security writer based in San Francisco. Diplomat, Foreign policy, War is boring and the Daily beast. In 2009, he co-founded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch.

All images are Creative Commons.