- Over the past century, the Soviet Union and Russia had several grand plans to build and use aircraft carriers.
- These plans have largely failed, in part because of competing military priorities and limited national resources.
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The Soviet Union was one of the largest and most industrial countries the world has ever seen.
Despite all of its engineering and manufacturing capacity, the USSR has never deployed a real aircraft carrier in its 74 years of existence. However, the country had several plans to build it and was working on a real porter, the Ulyanovsk, at the end of the Cold War.
After the communists’ victory in 1917, science and technology came to the fore to modernize Russia and the other Soviet republics. The military was no exception and invested resources in advanced technologies such as tanks, air forces, and surface and air missiles.
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was linked to several launch projects, including the first attempt at Izmail.
In 1927, the Soviet leadership approved plans to build a carrier by converting the unfinished battlecruiser of the Russian Imperial Navy Izmail, under construction since 1913, into a full-length aircraft carrier.
Completed as a battle cruiser, Izmail was expected to displace 35,000 tons, which was a similar displacement to the U.S. Navy’s Lexington-class interwar carriers of up to 78 aircraft (and from the same decade).
The US Navy aircraft carrier USS Lexington leaves San Diego on October 14, 1941.
US Navy
Unfortunately for the new Soviet Navy, the Izmail’s conversion was never completed and the ship was eventually scrapped.
While the idea of a Soviet aircraft carrier had its proponents, others, including the brilliant young Marshal Tukhachevsky, pointed out that, despite its size, the Soviet Union could not afford to build both an army and a navy comparable to its most powerful neighbors .
Tukhachevsky was right, and the Navy took a back seat to the ambitions of the Red Army (and the Air Force). This was a strategic dilemma that the Soviets inherited from the tsars and that lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – one that still affects the Russian government today.
The Soviet Union under Stalin measured economic and agricultural performance in five-year plans and in 1938 laid the foundation for two aircraft carriers as part of the third five-year plan.
The so-called “Project 71” class would be based on the Chapaev class cruisers, displace 13,000 tons and have a 630-foot flight deck. The carriers would each carry 15 fighters and 30 torpedo bombers, one of which was assigned to the Baltic Fleet and one to the Pacific Fleet. The girders were approved in 1939 but never completed; their construction was interrupted by World War II. A second project for a heavier 22,000 ton girder was proposed but construction never began.
In the mid-1940s, when the Soviet Union was embroiled in a deadly battle with Nazi Germany, another carrier concept was proposed. “Project 72” was described similarly to the previous Carrier project, but with 30,000 tons more than twice as large.
Another, similar design was the Kostromitinov project, which weighed 40,000 tons and would have been equipped with 66 fighters, 40 torpedo bombers and an unusual 16 152-millimeter guns.
A photo by the US Department of Defense of the Soviet helicopter carrier Leningrad from April 1, 1990.
Department of Defense
This suggests that the carrier might have been used to support amphibious landings in Scandinavia or the Baltic States, had it ever been built. While the Soviet Union has always been a land power for which land war should take precedence over sea war, the war situation in 1943 made it crystal clear that no resources could be taken from the Red Army to build an aircraft carrier of questionable use.
After the war, when the Red Army was the dominant land power in Eurasia, the Soviet Navy again pushed for more porters. Naval staff wanted a force of 15 carriers, nine large and six small, divided between the Pacific and Northern Fleets, with six of the large carriers being assigned to the Pacific and the remainder of the Northern Fleet.
However, Stalin did not want aircraft carriers and preferred to rely on battleships and cruisers. Soviet industry gave cover to Stalin, declaring that it did not yet have the capacity to build new types of ships.
Stalin was replaced by Nikita Khrushchev in 1953, but despite Khrushchev’s new ideas in the age of missile war, the best the Soviet Navy could get out of him was a single light carrier. The carrier, Project 85, would only displace 28,000 tons and carry 40 Navy MiG-19 fighters. This project was also canceled before construction began.
In 1962, the USSR began building two aircraft carriers at the Nikolaev shipyards in Ukraine. The two carriers, Moskva and Leningrad, were compromise ships, with the front half looking like a conventional guided missile cruiser and the rear half consisting of a flight deck, hangar, and elevator that carried planes between the two.
Soviet Kiev-class aircraft carrier Minsk, February 9, 1983.
U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Glenn Lindsey
The Moskva-class was likely designed to hunt American and British Polaris missile submarines operating near Soviet waters. Each Moskva ship carried up to a dozen anti-submarine helicopters, but otherwise had no offensive armament.
The Moskva class was followed by the Kiev class in the 1970s and 1980s, which had a similar mission, but the United States was on the verge of using the Trident missile with an even greater range. This meant the Soviet Navy had to operate even farther from its home waters and possibly face US Navy aircraft carriers.
As a result, the Kievans had offensive armament in the form of SS-N-12 “sandbox” anti-ship missiles, each of which could carry a 350-kilo-ton nuclear warhead. Four Kiev were built, a fifth approved but never completed.
The mid-1980s was a time of great expansion for the Soviet Navy, including the aircraft carriers. The USSR began building two 50,000-tonne class carriers and a nuclear powered supercarrier, Ulyanovsk, which was almost comparable to the American Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.
Of the three super ships, only one was completed before the end of the Cold War. The finished carrier was inherited from the Russian Navy, where he still serves today as Admiral Kuznetsov.
A semi-built aircraft carrier named Varyag by Russia and owned by Chinese is towed under the Bosphorus Bridge on November 1, 2001.
REUTERS / Fatih Saribas
The incomplete porter was purchased by Chinese stakeholders who forwarded it to the People’s Liberation Army Navy, where it was refitted in 2012 and commissioned as Porter Liaoning. Ulyanovsk was scrapped by Ukraine showing the unfinished hull after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
As a land power, the Soviet Union has never been able to provide enough of the country’s resources to build a true fleet of aircraft carriers.
There was always another perfectly sensible – and extremely practical – way of spending the country’s rubles, be it on the army or the air force, and later on nuclear weapons.
The non-strategic armed forces of the Russian Navy are already facing stiff competition from land and air forces, and the future of Russian naval aviation is again cloudy at best.
Kyle Mizokami is a San Francisco-based defense and national security writer who has appeared in Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring, and the Daily Beast. In 2009 he co-founded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami.
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