Best Russian Interwar Fleet

Not an area I know much about although Russian shipbuilding seems to have suffered from the Revolution

I'm guessing more and or better Destroyers , Submarines and mine warfare craft .

Less resources on Stalin's desire for big gun navy

Maybe some monitors for shore bombardment.
 
Littoral combat ships-MTBs and Mine Warfare, better subs, less of a surface fleet, though heavy guns sure didn't hurt during the siege of Leningrad
 
upload_2019-11-19_19-49-1.jpeg
images
upload_2019-11-19_19-50-58.jpeg

More focus on marines and coastal defence that can easily & cheaply be built in time not super ships?
 
Take the turrets out of the poorly designed WWI Battleships and build a few of these, also MTB's, small submarines, minelayers, destroyers and frigates. The Soviets don't need and can't afford a blue water navy, concentrate on defending the coast.

1024px-V%C3%A4in%C3%A4m%C3%B6inen.jpg
 
Take the turrets out of the poorly designed WWI Battleships
I think it would be cheaper to build these,
images
(wiki)
but might be willing to pay for overhead cover due to LW so more like,
WNGER_15-52_skc34_Todt_pic.jpg

http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNGER_15-52_skc34.php

looking at Soviet heavy guns you can save a fortune,
406 mm/50 (16") B-37 Pattern 1937 12 built cancel all.....
356 mm/52 (14") Pattern 1913 old but 18 available free in 1925 one used in otl CD....
12"/52 (30.5 cm) Pattern 1907 main gun I would use as they had lots of them,
126 of these were delivered prior to 1917 (some sources say 144 guns). In 1917-18 an additional 42 guns were delivered, but after that point the Russian Civil War halted production until 1921 when 14 more guns were finished. In 1922 there were 29 guns at the factory at different stages of completion, some of which were subsequently finished.
Navweps

That should do for cheap coastal defence with a load of mines and ASW/mine escort/sweepers at very low cost, spend the rest on industry, railways and army.

If you want to fight a bit offshore a few Subs would be useful and not that expensive bought/licenses from say Netherlands, Germany or Italy pre war.
 
Last edited:
And then your unfriendly neighbours decide to land just out of range from where your planners think they will and take those guns from behind.
 
And then your unfriendly neighbours decide to land just out of range from where your planners think they will and take those guns from behind.
Without proper ports and lacking US/UK/IJN mid/late war amphibious force they simply get rolled up by a Red army armoured corps that hits them....

I think placing them in fortresses
Kronshtadt (covering Leningrad)
Murmansk (covering the estuary of port north)
Taman (covering Kerch straight from east side)
Sevastopol (covering navy base) and potentially north covering land bridge of Crimea


A few in far east covering Vladivostok and the straight to Sakhalin
Maybe some less important and disposable forts covering black sea ports like Odessa and later a couple in Baltic's especially Estonia ports.


Would be pretty safe all would be in large well defended fortresses areas with large garrisons that would take a long time to attack giving time for the army to relive them or at least slowing down an invasion by making them cover them and denying useful ports?
 
Not an area I know much about although Russian shipbuilding seems to have suffered from the Revolution
How about don’t purge your entire senior leadership just before the war. All 8 of 8 senior Admirals were purged, kinda crimps the leadership style of the next inline.
 
Not an area I know much about although Russian shipbuilding seems to have suffered from the Revolution

I'm guessing more and or better Destroyers , Submarines and mine warfare craft .

Less resources on Stalin's desire for big gun navy

Maybe some monitors for shore bombardment.
Do discard any notion of new capital ships, they're out of reach. Do focus on submarines and coastal/riverine combatants. And Do seek foreign expertise to start getting large-scale shipbuilding back on its feet with new cruisers and destroyers, though if you can find someone other than the Italians who are willing to work with you.

The best Soviet fleet is one that can defend its coast, at least nominally inflict damage via submarine, and is working to rebuild its shipbuilding.
 
Best interwar soviet navy is one that is capable of a landing in Finland during the Winter War, so that Finland ends up occupied.

Second best is one as small as possible - AA guns and sailors moved to the front helped a great deal in several battles, but would have helped even more, had they been integrated into the Red Army from the start.

In various stages of completion were another 219 vessels including 3 battleships, 2 heavy and 7 light cruisers, 45 destroyers, and 91 submarines.
This was a total waste of resources that achieved exactly zero. Imagine all that steel being made into T-34s.

Soviet Black Sea Fleet's main accomplishment was evacuating the Odessa garrison, something that could have been achieved with far less combat ships, as the Romanian surface navy was tiny.
Soviet Baltic Fleet suffered a major disaster when trying to evacuate Tallinn:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_evacuation_of_Tallinn
More minesweepers and less combat ships would have been useful; a timely evacuation of Tallinn by land would have been even more useful...
 
I agree with those above saying that the best option is to build an essentially defensive Baltic fleet. Make the main priority of the fleet to defend the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland. This includes capability to quickly and extensively mine the waters west of Kronstadt. Superheavy coastal artillery can be used to protect these minefields, and you could also build some monitors to extend gun ranges against enemy ships that venture towards Leningrad. MTBs are also a cost-effective component for this kind of a system, and an argument could be made for developing (land-based) naval aviation, too.

However, if your doctrine includes any offensive components, you'll probably need at least submarines and possibly destroyers and destroyer leaders. If you plan to take Estonia and Finland, and the Estonian islands and the Ålands to extend the Leningrad-area defence to cover the same area as during the Tsarist times, you'll need ships to overcome the Estonian and Finnish naval defence. Of these two, only Finland has significant surface combatants in the Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen. To counter them, you'd conceivably need at least some ships with at minimum 10-12 inch guns, whatever form these ships take (monitor, coastal defence ship). If and when you then take Finland and Estonia, with those islands, these vessels will be useful for protecting your new coasts agains enemy operations. Bases in Finland and Estonia can also be handily used to try to strangle Swedish iron ore transports to Germany with submarine warfare.
 
Last edited:
Realistically the Soviets don't need a navy to fight anything they can reach on land. The job of the navy would be protecting important land strips from the navies of countries that can stand up to them on land enough to cause havoc with their navies at important locations. So coastal submarines everywhere, motor torpedo boats and minie layers everywhere, fast destroyers and cruisers in the East to be able to interfer with Japanese movements of troops on the nearby seas.

Now the large standing army being worth **** is another discussion.
 
Realistically the Soviets don't need a navy to fight anything they can reach on land. The job of the navy would be protecting important land strips from the navies of countries that can stand up to them on land enough to cause havoc with their navies at important locations. So coastal submarines everywhere, motor torpedo boats and minie layers everywhere, fast destroyers and cruisers in the East to be able to interfer with Japanese movements of troops on the nearby seas.

Now the large standing army being worth **** is another discussion.

Being able to overcome the Finnish naval defences and land troops on the Finnish coast and on the Ålands, and thus go around the Finnish defences in Karelia, and to cut Finland's connections west would have helped the USSR reach its main goals in the Winter War. This was very much a Finnish fear in the interwar, the Soviets using their comparatively bigger naval might to bypass the Finnish landside defences. The problem (for the Soviets) IOTL was that they didn't (apparently) have premade plans for such operations, and thus practically their actions on the maritime front were almost remarkably limited IOTL, even in the early part of the war when the Baltic was still free of ice.

Like I am wont to point out, grabbing Finland fair and square in 39-40 would have saved the USSR a lot of lives, resources and trouble come *Barbarossa.

So, the Soviets could benefit from having limited offensive capabilities, and some capacity for amphibious landing in the Baltic Sea area. But it does not realistically need to amount to going head-to-head against anyone bigger or further away than at most Sweden. The main targets for setting up this capacity would be Finland and the Baltic states.
 
Top