Stalingrad Class Battlecruiser - Construction

Construction

Three ships were started:

The first sections of Stalingrad had been laid down in November 1951 in Slipway "O" of the Marti South Shipyard in Nikolayev where a Sovetsky Soyuz-class battleship, Sovetskaya Ukraina, had begun construction in 1938, but the slipway itself was in need of reconstruction and its lower end was occupied by the hull of the Sverdlov-class light cruiser Mikhail Kutuzov which was scheduled for launch at the end of 1952. Moskva's keel was laid down in September 1952 by the Baltic Works in Leningrad. The unnamed third ship was laid down at Yard 402, at Molotovsk around October 1952, Soviet sources refer to her proposed names as the Kronshtadt or Arkhangelsk. A fourth ship was apparently ordered from Yard 402, but was never laid down.

Stalingrad's formal keel-laying was on 31 December 1951 and it was hoped that she could be launched on 6 November 1953, the eve of the 36th anniversary of the October Revolution. But deliveries of steel, armor, machinery and other equipment were delayed or arrived out of sequence, despite extraordinary efforts by the Ministry of Shipbuilding, and slowed construction enough so that she fell about six months behind schedule and the same was more or less true for the other ships. By 1 January 1953 Stalingrad was intended to be 42.9% complete, but was actually only 18.8% done. Moskva was planned to be 11.5% finished, but was only 7.5% done. And the unnamed ship was intended to be 5.2% along, but was only 2.5% complete.

These ships were canceled on 18 April 1953, after Stalin's death on 5 March, by the Ministry of Transport and Heavy Machinery, and the hulls of Moskva and the third ship were scrapped on the slipways later that year. The Ministry ordered in June that Stalingrad's hull, which was about 70% ready for launching, be used for weapons tests. Her hull was launched on 16 April 1954 and her stern, which was more or less complete, was dismantled—her bow hadn't been built when work was suspended a year earlier—and the central, 150-meter (490 ft) long, section was modified for her new role.