STALIN’S BIG-FLEET PROGRAM

Za Rodinu · Jun 20, 2008

Toward the end of 1935 Stalin’s mind became increasingly preoccupied, in an almost obsessive fashion, with plans to acquire rapidly a large oceangoing navy, larger in its total displacement than any other at that time and capable of achieving supremacy on all four seas and oceans that circumscribed the Soviet Union. Super-dreadnoughts were laid down in Soviet yards beginning in 1938. Immediately after the nonaggression pact of 1939, what the Soviets mainly wanted from the Germans in exchange for wheat, manganese, and petroleum was naval equipment.

The new capital ships were, however, destined never to be completed. Construction of other warships—cruisers, destroyers, and submarines—continued, in most cases to completion; the half-built carcasses of the battleships (clearly visible on German air reconnaissance photographs at the time) disappeared. Why had they been begun? What had been in the minds of Stalin and his collaborators? Stalin must have resolved that without a powerful navy the Soviet Union’s status as a great power could never be complete. Though the ruthless industrialization policies of the five-year plans of the mid-1930s produced rapid buildups of air and ground forces, especially tanks, the Soviet navy was a Cinderella, the least potent and most obsolescent of the three services. During the interwar years a large number of submarines were added, but the surface fleet had to rely on the few vessels of the old imperial navy that had survived the Civil War.
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STALIN?S BIG-FLEET PROGRAM

JCFalkenbergIII · Jun 21, 2008

LEND LEASE SHIPS for USSR
List provided by Alexander A. Tarnavsky

Pacific War, the early years

Za Rodinu · Jun 21, 2008

Have you got anything on the Lend-Lease sea-lane from the US West coast to Vladivostok, by the way? I know a thing or two on flights from Alaska to the USSR, but I'd like to know about this sea route.

JCFalkenbergIII · Jun 21, 2008

Ill have to check my favorites. I may have something about it. I have wayyy too many faorite sites LOL.

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STALIN’S BIG-FLEET PROGRAM

Za Rodinu Aquila non capit muscas

JCFalkenbergIII Expert

Za Rodinu Aquila non capit muscas

JCFalkenbergIII Expert

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