Stalin полностью

THE SOVIET UNION had a longer coastline than any other country—more than 16,000 nautical miles. Stalin, still reliant on imperial Russia’s aging fleet, had decided back in late 1935 that the country needed not only a modern navy, but one larger than any other in the world. He wanted to achieve command of the Gulf of Finland, the Black Sea, and the Sea of Japan, and, ultimately, attain a substantial offensive capability to challenge other powers on the oceans. His “big-fleet” program far exceeded in ambition Peter the Great’s, and formed part of a global naval arms race.³ The despot had established a self-standing naval commissariat during the terror.⁴ Then, between 1938 and 1940, he put to death the chief of Soviet naval forces, the commanders of the Pacific, Northern, Black Sea, and Baltic fleets, eight leaders of the central naval administration, five chiefs of staff of fleets, fifteen other flag officers, and dozens upon dozens of other high-ranking naval officers.⁵ In 1939, the navy claimed nearly a fifth of Soviet defense outlays. Nikolai Kuznetsov, the Serbian immigrants’ son who had joined the party at age nineteen in 1924 (the same year he attended Lenin’s funeral on Red Square), was promoted to naval commissar at thirty-four. He recalled that in late 1939, when he perceived Stalin to be in a good mood, he gently asked how the despot intended to use all the big, expensive ships under construction—the plan now called for 699 total—in light of the shallowness of the Baltic Sea (which could be readily mined) and the Pact with Hitler (altering Germany’s status as the main enemy). Stalin answered, “We shall build them even if we have to scramble up the last kopeck!”⁶

A super-dreadnought, the Soviet Ukraine, had been laid down at the Nikolayev Shipyard for the Black Sea Fleet. The keels of two heavy cruisers were laid down for the Pacific Fleet at a new shipyard founded on the Amur River, at remote Komsomolsk, out of range of Japanese fighter planes. About 120,000 slave laborers had started construction on another shipyard for the new Northern Fleet, at Molotovsk, on the delta of the Northern Dvina, above the Arctic Circle. At the Baltic Shipyard, in Leningrad, another super-dreadnought, the Soviet Union, had been laid down for the high-priority yet weak Baltic Fleet.⁷ By 1940, plans for oceangoing ships would be made larger still, but the number to be built would be reduced in favor of submersibles. (Characteristically, Stalin would order that the revised naval program’s details be kept secret from his own fleet commanders.)⁸ Blueprints and advanced naval technology had to be purchased abroad. France demurred, and Britain was not even approached, but fascist Italy had proved eager.⁹ Still, Nazi Germany was the chief source, and naval equipment formed a centerpiece of Soviet desiderata after the Pact with Hitler—cruisers, coastal and naval guns, battleship blueprints, and at least three samples of the heavy gun turrets fitted on the Bismarck and Tirpitz battleships.¹⁰

Stalin’s various slave-labor internal canals had not enhanced his navy’s room for maneuver. The Black Sea was relatively narrow and hemmed in, while the Arctic Sea was icebound most of the year and the Pacific coast was remote from Soviet industry and population. But the most immediate challenge was the Baltic, where the Soviet shipbuilding program lagged behind the capabilities of both the German and the British navies, and, even worse, the Soviet Fleet depended on the goodwill of Finland and Estonia just to get in and out. Baltic defenses could not block hostile navies from approaching the USSR’s shores, as had transpired during the Russian civil war. More broadly, the 1932 Soviet-Finnish treaty recognizing tsarist Finland’s independence had settled the land border on the Karelian Isthmus, less than twenty miles from Leningrad, a distance that, by the 1930s, fell well within artillery range. In other words, Leningrad, the only Soviet port on the Baltic and the home to a third of Soviet military industry, could be fired upon without entering Soviet territory. Stalin worried that a hostile great power would make use of Finnish territory as a launch pad to seize the USSR’s second capital and set up a Russian “White Guard” regime, with the aim of provoking a new civil war to destroy the Soviet regime.¹¹