Stalin's Ocean-Going Fleet: Soviet Naval Strategy and Shipbuilding Programmes, 1935-1953 (review)

In the early and mid-1990s, access to previously closed archives and other research establishments in Russia cemented ties between western historians focused on the Soviet Navy and their colleagues in the former Soviet Union. From such ties emerged alliances between scholars which, exploiting the openness of the times, used the availability of new materials to produce (as of November 2003) two book-length English-language studies of note. The first study to appear was the book under review here. (The other is Cold War Submarines: The Design and Construction of Soviet and American Submarines by Norman Polmar and K. J. Moore [Brassey's]. Other volumes, including The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Navy in the Baltic, 1921-1940, by Gunnar Aselius [Frank Cass, forthcoming] are anticipated.)

With Stalin's Ocean-Going Fleet, Jürgen Rohwer, a well-known naval historian from Germany, and Mikhail S. Monakov, who is chief of the Russian Federation Navy's history program, fill significant gaps in the historiography of the Soviet Navy. Early chapters examine the reconstitution and consolidation phases of Soviet naval development after 1918. The heart of the book is an analysis of Soviet naval strategy and shipbuilding programs from late 1935, when Stalin ended all debate and demanded a rapid shift from a "small war at sea" strategy in favor of one centered on capital ships and a "mastery of the sea" strategy, through his death in 1953, when his successors brought a halt to his specific plans. The authors examine, on the basis of original records, why Stalin attempted to build a blue-water navy.

The authors use unprecedented detail to argue that, contrary to both western and Soviet views, the planned buildup of the fleet was based on a rational unified operational concept, which involved achieving command of the sea in the Gulf of Finland, the Black Sea, and the Sea of Japan, repelling invasions in the Baltic and Northern seas, and ultimately obtaining a substantial offensive capability, and was not merely a pipe dream of Stalin's, that is, at least in the 1930s and 1940s, when all the great powers were building battleships. To be sure, Stalin's authority, personal interests, and his understanding of how navies fight exerted substantial influence over planning, particularly after the Great Patriotic War, when he stubbornly refused to acknowledge the role of important new systems, such as the aircraft carrier, and could not be swayed from his interest in battle cruisers. The timing and consequences of the war undermined Stalin's vision of a Soviet blue-water fleet, but not even his death could put an end to the vision altogether. In spite of competing views of the utility of a navy, Soviet politics, and inter-service rivalries, it was successfully revived along modern lines in the 1960s.

What is important to note is that the practice of devising a naval strategy and building a fleet—focused as it was on such objective factors as perceived threats, the deteriorating international situation, foreign and domestic industrial capability, geography, history, etc.—could differ in theory, that is Marxist theory. The arguments presented by Soviet naval officers for one form or another of naval strategy were the same as those being debated in western countries.

This large format work is enhanced by much additional material. A detailed discussion of the historiography of the subject, a meticulous analysis of Stalin's purges—they first struck the Soviet Navy in 1930—and their effects, a review of the debate about a Soviet preemptive attack on Germany in 1941, a note on Soviet and Russian sources and studies, some seventy pages of highly detailed appendixes about the warships that...