Sovetsky Soyuz Class Battleship - Construction

Construction

The August 1938 shipbuilding plan envisioned a total of 15 Project 23-class battleships, and this grandiose scheme was only slightly revised downward to 14 ships in the August 1939 plan. Eight of these were to be laid down before 1942 and the remaining six before 1947. However, only four were actually laid down before the outbreak of World War II forced the Soviets to reassess their ambitious plans. On 19 October 1940 an order was issued, signed by Stalin and Molotov, that no new battleships would be laid down in order to concentrate on smaller ships' building (and also, probably, because more resources were required for the Army), one ship is to be scrapped, and priority should be given to only one of the three remaining battleships.

The Soviet shipbuilding and related industries proved to be incapable of supporting the construction of so many large ships at the same time. The largest warships built in the Soviet Union prior to 1938 were the 8,000-metric-ton (7,874-long-ton) Kirov-class cruisers and even they had suffered from a number of production problems, but the Soviet leadership appeared to ignore the difficulties encountered in the construction of the Kirov class when ordering 14 much more ambitious ships. Construction of two more ships planned for Leningrad and Nikolayev had to move to the brand-new Shipyard Nr. 402 in Molotovsk because the existing shipyards could not be expanded to handle so many large ships. Components for these two ships had to be manufactured at Leningrad and shipped via the White Sea – Baltic Canal to Molotovsk. Also, the turret shop at Nikolaev proved to be too poorly equipped to assemble the 406 mm mountings and the propeller shafts had to be ordered in 1940 from Germany and the Netherlands as the domestic plants were already overburdened with orders. Shipbuilding steel proved to be in short supply in 1940 and a number of batches were rejected because they did not meet specifications. Armor plate production was even more problematic as only 1,800 metric tons (1,772 long tons) of the anticipated 10,000 metric tons (9,842 long tons) were delivered in 1939 and more than half of that was rejected. Furthermore the armor plants proved to be incapable of making cemented plates over 230 mm and inferior face-hardened plates had to substitute for all thicknesses over 200 millimeters (8 in).

Machinery problems were likely to delay the ships well past their intended delivery dates of 1943–44. Three turbines were delivered by Brown Boveri in 1939 to Arkhangelsk for the Sovetskaya Rossiya, but the Kharkhovskii Turbogenerator Works never completed a single turbine before the German invasion in June 1941. A prototype boiler was supposed to have been built ashore for evaluation, but it was not completed until early 1941, which further complicated the production plan.

Construction of all three ships was ordered halted on 10 July 1941 and the Sovetsky Soyuz was placed into long-term conservation as the most advanced ship. However all three were officially stricken from the Navy List on 10 September 1941.