Stalingrad Class Battlecruiser

Stalingrad Class Battlecruiser

The Stalingrad-class battlecruiser, also known in the Soviet Union as Project 82 (Russian: Тяжёлые крейсера проекта 82), was intended to be built for the Soviet Navy after World War II. Three ships were ordered, but none were ever completed.

A heavy cruiser was designed before the Second World War as an intermediate between the light cruiser Kirov and Chapayev classes and the Kronshtadt-class battlecruisers. The specification, or OTZ in Russian, was issued in May 1941, but plans were shelved with the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany. Construction was proposed again in 1943. After a lengthy design period, which Premier Joseph Stalin—a major supporter of the project—often had a hand in, keels for two ships were laid at the Marti South Shipyard in Nikolayev (1951) and the Baltic Works in Leningrad (1952) and a third ship was planned for the shipyard in Severodvinsk.

The Project 82 design which was ordered would have been much larger than the original intermediate design, so much so that they were considered the successors to the Kronshtadts, which had been canceled at the outbreak of World War II. As envisioned by Stalin, the Stalingrad battlecruisers' role would be to disrupt and break up an enemy's light cruisers when they approached the Soviet coast. However, after his death in March 1953, the ships were canceled by the Ministry of Transport and Heavy Machinery. Only the incomplete hull of Stalingrad was launched; used as a floating target for anti-ship missiles, it was scrapped around 1962.