Stalin's Ocean-Going Fleet: Soviet Naval Strategy and Shipbuilding Programmes, 1935-1953 - Book Review

Naval War College Review, Summer, 2003 by Willard C. Frank, Jr.

Rohwer, Jurgen, and Mikhail S. Monakov. Stalin's Ocean-Going Fleet: Soviet Naval Strategy and Shipbuilding Programmes, 1935-1953. Portland, Ore.: Frank Cass, 2001. 334pp. $57.50

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of major Russian archives have provided an opportunity to add greatly to our understanding of the character of the Soviet navy. Eminent researchers Jurgen Rohwer and Mikhail S. Monakov have contributed much to this understanding with their study of Soviet naval shipbuilding and strategy when Josef Stalin controlled the development of the Soviet Navy, from 1935 until his death in 1953. They have uncovered extensive details of the massive shipbuilding program, most of which never came to fruition. Strategy, however, remains as murky as ever. This study complements but does not replace Monakov's series of articles on Soviet naval doctrine and Stalin's fleet in Morskoi sbornik, 1992-98, or Robert W. Herrick's Soviet Naval Theory and Policy: Gorshkov's Inheritance (1989).

At the end of 1935 Stalin personally yanked the Soviet navy from littoral defense through air, submarine, and light surface forces into a grandiose shipbuilding program centered on large battleships and battle cruisers, while retaining "Young School" craving for submarines. Stalin took naval strategy into his own hands but never divulged any strategic precepts or plans to his naval leaders, who in fear of Stalin's wrath dutifully adapted themselves to the imposed scheme, several falling to the purges anyway. The result was a massive shipbuilding program and a naval officer corps stranded in a strategic wilderness, with silent misgivings about the apparent dissonance between the projected force structure and operational commitments arising from the Soviet Union's particular geostrategic position.

By 1939 an immense program had evolved to build twenty-four powerful battleships by 1947, with fifteen for the Pacific Fleet and the rest divided among the Baltic, Black Sea, and Northern Fleets. Concurrent plans called for a submarine force intended to reach 438 units, of which 219 were earmarked for the Pacific. These fleet goals, along with a modicum of light surface forces, were impossible for Soviet shipbuilding capacity, even by halting merchant ship construction. With the onset of the Great Patriotic War, all long-term projects were suspended; only submarine and light surface projects continued, as circumstances allowed. The defeat of the Axis saw the prewar schemes reduced to three battleships and three battle cruisers, all of which were cancelled when Stalin died. The Sverdlov-class cruisers and a new submarine force of 284 boats became the shrunken legacy of Stalin's naval dreams.

The navy of Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov, under army operational control but without strategic direction from the General Staff or the top, continued to orient itself before, during, and after World War II toward traditional defensive roles--defeating attacking enemy fleets and amphibious expeditions in the near seas--with only a limited submarine offensive on adjacent enemy sea lines of communications.

Stalin's motive for building a battleship fleet, according to the authors, was the vision of the Soviet Union gaining supremacy in the four near seas and then becoming an oceanic power, with the battleship or battle cruiser "a symbol of the highest grade of power, a most powerful and mobile instrument of power politics, that the world had ever known," the direct predecessor of the atomic bomb in attaining superpower status.

Stalin, however, left no direct evidence of his reasons, whereas several indicators point toward a dominant mental construct of positional strategic defense still guiding Stalin and his admirals. He and his naval leaders agreed on a defense strategy but diverged on preferred force structure. Stalin rejected the aircraft carrier, despite all the evidence from the Second World War of the importance of air power at sea for a blue-water navy. Kuznetsov often pleaded in vain with Stalin for stronger shipboard antiaircraft defenses on ships, for aircraft carriers to cover surface forces from enemy air attack out to three hundred miles from naval bases, and to limit Soviet land-based air support. In 1946, Kuznetsov's close associate Admiral Vladimir Alafuzov developed a positional scheme of supremacy under land-based air cover up to one hundred miles from naval bases, and conditional sea control by large surface vessels with limited air support in a "far zone" out to three hundred miles. This fell short of command o f the expanses of the Barents, Baltic, and Black Seas or of most of the Sea of Japan. Only submarines with long endurance could operate in the open ocean, but Stalin preferred medium submarines, conceived for operations in near seas against an amphibious threat. The projected battleships would have had an operational radius only half that of their contemporaries in oceanic navies. Only current Italian battleships, also designed for near seas, had such limited autonomy. To operate across the open ocean was a ludicrous concept to Stalin in 1945, arguing for a defensive posture for at least ten to fifteen years to come. Stalin's projected "large sea and oceanic navy," to use the Soviet term, was likely created for a hoped-for more robust traditional strategic defensive in contiguous seas. The evidence in this book, if not its title, lends support to Herrick's judgment of a Stalinist strategy of limited command of the near seas. To suggest that it was "the first step on the road to global naval power," as does se ries editor Holger Herwig in the preface, would require Stalin and his navy to demonstrate a conceptual leap for which neither had shown a proclivity. Mind-sets resist change. Even in the navy of Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, who inherited Stalin's schemes and built up Kuznetsov's fleet, extensive deployments did not replace deeply held positional and defensive assumptions. Had Stalin's "oceanic" fleet actually been built, whether a shift of orientation by him or his admirals toward "global naval power" would have occurred remains undemonstrated and problematic.