Chapter CLI: The Challenges of Floating a Bear
At first glance the Anglo-Soviet Naval Agreement should never really have been signed, it's name is a clue to it's inauspicious beginnings as a counter-part to the disastrously failed Anglo-German Naval Agreement. It began life as part of the web of naval arms control agreements the Foreign Office was attempting to weave in the early 1930s, bringing as many powers as possible into the naval treaty system so as to stabilise a broadly favourable status quo; the more powers involved, the less reason any signed up power had to justify a 'new threat' that required more tonnage. However with the London treaty expired and it's replacement dead, from the British perspective the talks appeared redundant; Britain was not going to limit her fleet if the other major naval powers were not and there seemed no reason at all why the Soviets would unilaterally do so. Despite this the talks did persist as the Soviet delegation explained that, while limitation was absolutely not on the table, naval co-operation was something they wished to continue discussing. This prompted a degree of concerned interest in Whitehall, with the treaties dead there was very little on the naval side that Britain wanted from the Soviets while it was well known that they had a very long list of secret technologies and sensitive equipment they wished to acquire. While the Foreign Office would have entertained the talks just out of diplomatic politeness, and to try and find out exactly what it was that Moscow wanted to help inform wider policy, at the strategic level they were broadly in favour of a stronger Soviet Navy. In their view a meaningful Soviet naval presence in the Baltic and Far East would distract Germany and Japan respectively, making both less likely to make trouble for British interests. The Treasury and Board of Trade were both keen on anything that increased exports, while even the Bank of England chipped in to note the large Sterling credit balance on the Soviet clearing account and how it would be good if that could be reduced by, for example, the Soviets buying a lot of industrial and naval engineering equipment. In the face of this opposition the Admiralty and Intelligence agencies fought a brave rearguard to avoid anything that would encourage the Soviets but were ultimately out-voted, with the caveat that the Cabinet was only agreeing to talks not to actually release anything.
The Project 1 destroyer leader Kharkov in harbour prior to trials. As may be guessed from the project name this was the first proper warship built in the Soviet Union since the revolution and it was just as troubled as you would expect. The lead ship Leningrad was laid down late in 1932 and would be launched a year later, unfortunately it was launched without any engines inside and without weapons, the turbines still being under production while the 130mm (5.1") main guns were still being designed. As a result the Leningrad and her sisters would take four years to build and then another two years in the yard fixing the problems that emerged during trials, not least the weak hull and instability at all speeds. While all aspects of the construction were troublesome and plagued by defective parts (with a reported 90% rejection rate for the more complex items) the main problems had been hull design and detailing, turbine and engine room systems and guns and fire controls, not coincidentally areas the pre-revolutionary Russian Imperial navy had also struggled with.
Where the British government was divided on the naval talks, the Politburo was entirely united in what it hoped to achieve. The commanders of the 'Naval Forces of the Red Army' as the Soviet Navy was formally known had a relatively realistic view of what was needed, what could be built and what could be operated, all of which were slightly different things. For the Second Five Year Plan (which was supposed to cover 1933 to 1938) they had intended to focus on submarines and lighter forces, along with land based naval aircraft and a new generation of fortresses and gunnery emplacements at key naval ports and coastal cities. It was mostly a defensive force, while some of the submarines were expected to go out and raid the enemy the bulk of the forces were intended to stop foreign powers being able to land at will along the coast; memories of the many Allied landings and interventions in the Russian Civil War still lingered. This plan met with general approval within the wider Soviet government, the air force was of course pleased at more aircraft being built, the army was eyeing up the coastal artillery and fortresses, the foreign ministry was pleased at the lack of 'provocative' capital ship building (this was the era of 'Collective Security' in Soviet foreign policy) while the planners at Gosplan were just relieved that it was a modest programme that was probably within the capacity of Soviet industry. However the Soviet Union of the time was a country of One Man, One Vote; Stalin was the man and he had the vote. Therefore as Stalin wanted battleships all those plans were chucked away and the admirals were instructed to plan a full scale ocean going fleet built around a large gun line of battleships. This does lead to the question of why Stalin was so keen on a large fleet of ocean going capital ships when there was no apparent military need for them. The answer is a mix of national pride, a desire for a power projection force, a determination to get Soviet diplomacy taken more seriously outside her near neighbours and a degree of insecurity in a Soviet regime that was obsessed with big numbers and big projects. These tendencies had been pushed into over-drive by the
Komsomol Affair in December 1936. Notionally an innocent Soviet flagged freighter carrying manganese ore to Belgium, she had actually been carrying a load of light arms and T-26 tanks to the Soviet aligned factions in Spain. Intercepted by the Monarchist heavy cruisers
Canarias inside Monarchist claimed waters she had been forced to stop and then sunk, her crew saved but all cargo on board lost. Stalin had asked for future shipments to be escorted by the Red Navy, to ensure they got through and as a response to this embarrassment. The head of the naval forces, Admiral Orlov, argued against this on the ground that (a) the fleet did not have any ships to spare for overseas duties and (b) even if he did the ships would be so weak and obsolete that they would not deter the
Canarias and instead just shame the country and the revolution. Reluctantly this was accepted and Soviet freighters would resort to long circuitous routes, hiding in French convoys and delivering to inconvenient ports to sneak their way into Spain, domestically meanwhile the battleship programme became an even higher priority. In an macabre coincidence Orlov would be was arrested and sentenced to be shot as a British spy at the same time as the Anglo-Soviet Naval Agreement was being signed. It has been suggested that this was a delayed revenge on Orlov for contradicting Stalin, or at least telling him something he didn't want to hear. As all three of his predecessors and his two immediate successors would also be arrested and executed within the next two years, it is unlikely it was anything personal and that he would have been purged regardless of what he had said to Stalin about Spain.
Admiral Orlov prior to his fall from grace, a life long political Admiral it was darkly appropriate that it would be political intrigue that would kill him in the end. It is indicative of the status of the Soviet Navy that while it was harshly purged, along with Orlov and his predecessors eight out of the nine serving Admirals would be executed with a similar pattern down the ranks, it was not subject to it's own specific show trial. The Army had the 'Case of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization' where supporting the wrong doctrine or questioning the role of horses in modern warfare was used as evidence against the victims, while the Navy was just purged without publicity or any particular care for internal naval politics. In a blood soaked irony Stalin purged the older naval officers for being 'unreliable' as their careers had started under the Tsars, yet it was that group who had been most supportive of his big battleship policy, in part because big battleships had been the naval policy of the Russian Empire and was what they had been trained to aspire to.
In theory the Soviets already had an agreement that would provide them with naval advice and expertise, the grandly titled Italo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Non-Aggression and Neutrality. Once it had become clear during the
Leningrad saga that building a fleet would require either time and patience while the Soviet learnt through trial and error or foreign expertise, Stalin had quickly decided on the later option. In pursuit of this all five of the treaty naval powers had been approached but only Mussolini had been desperate (or foolish) enough to make a deal, ideology being less important to both sides than economic pragmatism. Alongside the port visits, official tours and general diplomatic palaver the core of the arrangement was swapping Italian naval technologies and design knowledge for Soviet coal, oil and wheat. While it was the only option available to the Soviets it should be noted that Italian design habits were also seen as a good match for Soviet naval doctrine of the time; high speed, plenty of guns, light armour and minimal endurance seemed appropriate priorities for how the Admirals wanted to fight while providing the necessary big numbers to impress Stalin. While the deal remained in place till later in the decade and all the commercial clauses and orders were honoured, if only to keep Italy on-side diplomatically, Soviet interest had been wavering even before the Abyssinian War as the limits of Italian naval expertise became apparent. The disastrous showing of the Regia Marina in that conflict had convinced Stalin that the Italian design priorities were wrong and further reinforced his doubts about their basic competencies, he therefore instructed that for his battleships a new, more competent, source of technical advice would have to be found. This was where the Anglo-Soviet Naval Agreement talks came in, with the Royal Navy's reputation at new heights the British were even more desirable as a technical partner while on the political side it was believed Eden would be more likely to make a deal than his most recent predecessors. In theory of course the Soviets could just hire whoever they wished without any such deal, they had £10 million worth of Sterling credits underwritten by the Export Credit Guarantee Department and there would always be a Merchant Bank that would help them find a way to spend it. In practice unofficial contacts with the major arms firms had confirmed that without British government approval none of them would be selling the items the Soviets wished to buy, hence the need for the agreement.
The X and Y turrets of the Soviet cruiser Kirov in the summer of 1937 while she was undergoing trials in the Baltic Sea. Built at the Ordzhonikidze yard near Leningrad the design was heavily based on the Regia Marina light cruiser Raimondo Montecuccoli and built with assistance of the Italian state owned Ansaldo company. As the largest ship built from the keel up since the revolution great things were expected of her, it was therefore unfortunate quite how badly wrong the trials went. The much vaunted Italian designed turbines underperformed making her slower than expected, though the fact she was also 800t over-weight did not help. During the test-firing of the 7.1-inch guns the decks buckled and the superstructure was damaged, due to both incorrect gun positioning (the turrets and firing arcs had been sized for Italian 153mm/6-inch guns) and the failure of the shipyard to follow the welding specification. To add injury to injury a test-fired dummy torpedo circled back after launch and knocked off one of the ship’s propellers, requiring the ship to be towed back to port. The debacle resulted in the arrest of the navy’s acceptance commission, a purge of the yard and an added keenness in Moscow to find a new technical partner on naval matters.
If the Soviets had merely wanted to buy warships and key components then the talks may have been easier, Britain was well practised at the art of offering up ships or components that were good enough for a buyer to accept without giving away anything actually important. The problem was that Moscow wanted the ability to design and build their own ships with no reliance on imported parts or designs, hoping to employ the same model they had used for many of their civilian industries during the previous years; hire international experts, suck their brains dry of knowledge training a first generation of Soviet experts, get those new Soviet experts to train the second generation and then finally purge the first generation as "unreliable" due to excess exposure to foreign influences. While unaware of the full details the British could recognise the general shape of the Soviet plan, as it very much resembled the technical portion of the Anglo-Japanese alliance but with a wasteful and paranoid purging stage added on. Under the alliance British engineers and naval officers had worked in Japan and Japanese engineers had been trained in Britain, this resulted in a relatively rapid and comprehensive transfer of naval and naval aviation knowledge to Japan, to the point where by the early 1920s the Japanese were entirely capable of designing very capable ships and making technical advances of their own. As the British Empire was at that point re-arming in part due to the threat from Japan this was not an experience that anyone in government wished to repeat, as there was no possibility of a compromise on this the Foreign Office was primed for the failure of the talks and set itself the limited aim of trying to end them amicably. That this did not occur is not a testament to the skill of the diplomats involved but to the shear desperation of Stalin to acquire a battleship, as a final incentive he authorised the discussion of one of the forbidden topics: the Tsarist era pre-revolutionary debts which Lenin had repudiated. From a Soviet perspective these debts were utterly unfair, illegitimate and in any event the responsibility of a regime that no-longer existed, naturally the creditors saw it as a default from a state that was more than happy to claim to be the heir of Tsarist Russia when there were treaty rights or trade statuses it wished to claim. While the bulk of the debts remained off limits, the offer was made to resume payments on some of the railway bonds which had predominantly been sold to British investors and which Moscow had previously indicated it would consider repaying if the creditors made certain concessions, mostly massive new loans on very generous terms. The sums in question were tiny compared to the overall Tsarist debts, which ran to just shy of four billion pounds, but would still result in several million a year flowing back to creditors and into the British economy, the lengthy process of capital ship construction and commissioning ensuring the Soviets would keep their side of the deal for at least a few years until the new ships had been handed over. This massive bribe, along with an acceptance on the Soviet side that there would be no training, officers exchange or deliberate knowledge transfer, was enough to get the outline of a deal agreed. The Soviets would purchase a single capital ship from a British yard which had been designed to their specifications and the plans for that ship would be transferred to the Soviets along with details of the key systems, a destroyer leader and plans would be sold on the same basis.
The Project 1058 hybrid battleship carrier designed for the Soviet Union by the US firm Gibbs and Cox, this particular variant had four triple 15" gun turrets and a capacity for 36 aircraft and was expected to displace around 72,000 tonnes. As the flight deck was fairly short a series of catapults were provided to launch aircraft, the deck itself only being used for landings. Unsurprisingly even simple wind tunnel testing proved the design did not actually work as a carrier and it's un-armoured flight deck and exposed aviation fuel tanks made it hideously vulnerable as a battleship. Most damning of all was the fact that two separate specialised ships would in fact be cheaper to build and run, so there wasn't even a cost saving. The rejection of this design and the other hybrid battle-carriers Gibbs and Cox had produced, along with the rejection of the Italian UP.41 design from Ansaldo, marked the end of Soviet efforts to procure a battleship and technical knowledge from other sources. After this point all efforts would be focused on exploiting the Anglo-Soviet Naval Agreement.
At first glance this seems to be exactly the sort of knowledge transfer the Admiralty was desperate to avoid and certainly they were not happy about this, but as is so often the case the devil was in the detail. To begin with the designs were to be bespoke for the Soviets and not actual Royal Navy designs, so would very much be 'export grade' with all the limitations and technological exclusions that term implies. As an example the Soviets already had Italian range finders from their previous agreements and the British had become aware that those units were marginally upgraded versions of Great War-era Barr & Stroud units that had been sold to Italy during that conflict. It was therefore easy enough to supply something similar direct from Barr & Stroud which was still an improvement on what the Soviets had, but did not include the lessons from the war and fell well short of anything the Admiralty would dream of using themselves. Secondly there was no requirement for the technology in the ships to actually be Admiralty spec or even British, as they had with the Dutch battlecruiser order a range of non-British systems would be integrated into the final design that was handed over. The Italian Pugliese torpedo defence system would once again be included in an export design and much of the armour would end up being of Czech origin, partly to protect British metallurgical advances but mostly because, as we have seen previously, there just was not enough capacity in Britain to produce the required additional plate without delaying the Royal Navy's own programme. Finally the Admiralty reassured itself that just having a set of plans alone was barely the start of being able to design a ship, the blueprints would tell you how large elements had to be but would not tell you why. The plans would say a certain member was detailed at 0.5" thick, but was that for structural reasons, damage resistance, to provide mass to stop vibration or was it over-sized but specified to simply supply and construction by using a few standard sizes? While the Soviet designers would eventually figure it out the aim had never been to stop Soviet naval development, which was recognised as impossible, just to make sure they couldn't quickly 'catch up'. With these details sorted the biggest sticking point soon became the size of the main guns, there was a brief forlorn effort from the British size to pitch something similar to the Dutch battlecruiser with it's 12" guns which was dismissed for the same reason the Soviet's own Project 25 design had been cancelled; Stalin wanted a larger ship with bigger guns. A 13.5" option using surplus Royal Navy barrels to 'speed up construction' was also rejected by the Soviets while the British flatly refused to contemplate selling the 15" or 16" guns they used themselves. A begrudging compromise was reached on 14" guns on the basis that they were the largest the Soviets had a realistic chance of manufacturing themselves given the limits of their gun pit infrastructure, most of which had been inherited from the Tsars and originally sourced from Britain in the first place. The final design would officially be Project 69 in Soviet speak and the lead in class would be dubbed the Kronshtadt.
A contemporary painting of what it was hoped the Kronshtadt would look like, the triple 14" turrets and tall blocky superstructure favoured by Soviet design being prominent. The painting also attempted to emphasise the speed of the ship with 34knots being targeted as the design speed, this speed was part of the reason the Kronshtadts were classified as battlecruisers by the Soviet Navy along with the less discussed fact it was not armoured against gun of it's own size. The relatively light armour was because it had the classic battlecruiser mission of hunting treaty cruisers and cruiser-killer designs such as the German Scharnhorsts. Their nearest peers could be considered the re-built Japanese Kongos, in comparison to which they had the edge in heavy guns and a considerable speed advantage though a somewhat smaller and less efficient armour layout. In Stalin's grand naval plans they would not be the pride of the fleet however, that spot going to the massive Sovetsky Soyuz-class battleships which where secretly being developed in parallel and were intended to start construction once enough had been learnt from the design process for the Kronshtadts.
While there was a degree of domestic backlash to the deal from the more virulently anti-communist types the rubicon had to some extent been crossed many years ago when the MacDonald government had recognised the Soviet Union and British firms had begun trading with the Soviet state. More recently than that it had only been the previous year that the cabinet had agreed to underwrite the £10 million Soviet credit line in the hopes of improving relations and encouraging trade, an event which had mostly passed un-remarked upon but in hindsight was an indicator of the deals to come. Nevertheless the government did still have to walk a careful line between reassuring parliament and the public that no vital defence knowledge was being given away while not outright telling the Soviets that they were being sold second-rate goods, though in reality they were well aware of the reality of the situation, as Stalin would rhetorically ask "What fool would sell us their secrets?". To the surprise of most it would be the destroyer leader part of the deal, which many in the negotiating team had treated as an after thought, that would provoke the biggest reaction. The UK-Soviet trade commissioner had approached several of the major yards about the vessel and Yarrow, Dennys and Thornycroft had all expressed an interest with the result that the actual Soviet requirements were being thrashed out as the rival designs developed, the Admiralty was keeping a close eye on the process to make sure a commercial desire to win the contract did not induce any of the firms to offer some design or technology they shouldn't and so rapidly became aware of the problem. British destroyer speed was set as around 36 knots for speed trials and a somewhat more leisurely 32 knots when fully fuelled and laden, the Admiralty did not consider extra speed being worth the extra tonnage or compromises elsewhere so had seen no reason to ask for more, however the Soviets wanted 40 knots or greater from the design as their doctrine emphasised the value and importance of speed. As all the firms had based their submission on the post-war standard British destroyer (the A- through I-classes) to save money, all being well aware this was a one off which did not particularly justify an expensive design effort, a range of options were considered from just making the hulls larger to fit in more boilers through to drastically cutting back on armaments and build strength to save weight. It was the Yarrow Shipbuilding company which first approached the Admiralty to get clearance for the easiest solution, fitting more efficient engines. This did involve making the slightly awkward point that the engines currently being fitted to British destroyers were quite some way from cutting edge and so it would be entirely possible to fit better engines to the Soviets designs while still giving them out of date and second string technology. Naturally this did not go down well and the Admiralty hurriedly launched an investigation into quite was happening with the propulsion of their ships.
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Notes:
A bit of a wide ranging one, but I think I managed to keep it on track and actually result in something that could be confused with plot, if you were so inclined. The central part of this chapter, the Anglo-Soviet Naval Agreement did happen and was the counter-part to German one that notionally kicked of Butterfly all those years ago. It was however just a vague ish agreement from the Soviets to comply with tonnage limits on ships and notifications in exchange for Britain giving them advice on modern 6" guns so the Soviets would stop using their 7.1" guns which didn't really fit in the Treaty classification system, naturally the Soviets lied from day one and the British never delivered anything particularly useful as a result. The £10 million credit line is OTL surprisingly and about 3/4 was spent on naval related items in OTL, not least a 25,000t capacity dry dock from Sawn Hunter, with the rest going on electrical equipment and machine tools.
The Italo-Soviet treaty, the naval tech for coal/oil/grain trade and the resulting problem ridden ships are OTL, as was Stalin's 'interventions' in naval policy and negotiations. In OTL he apparently monitored the talks daily, regularly dispensed detailed design advice on the shipbuilding and did authorise the mission to the US to get Gibbs & Cox to design those monstrous BB-CV hybrids. OTL they got another chance and designed a sensible battleship in 1939 and Stalin was so desperate to get it he did offer to resume payments on the Tsarists debts owed to the US as a sweetener to get the US government to agree, but the USN had the Treaty system to hide behind as well as the US' own build up and got it killed. Didn't seem unreasonable for him to make the same limited offer to Britain, particularly as with the Abyssinian War and the Komsomol Affair he is even keener to get battleships in general and 'war proven' RN tech in particular. This will very much annoy France as they were the biggest Tsarist creditor by far, well over 50% of the total, yet will continue to get nothing, however no-one is that fussed by this. On a related point the formation of the Axis saw the Italo-Soviet treaty quietly dropped by both sides, here it is somewhat downgraded but the Italians remain very keen sellers as foreign orders are the only thing keeping their naval industry going (and they still need a foreign source of coal and oil) so the Soviets are happy to carry on exploiting that for the things the Italians are good at making.
I'm aware I've skimmed over the purges somewhat, the Great Terror is all OTL and better covered elsewhere so I've just covered the bits relevant to the navy. This did mean I couldn't mention the Esperanto Purge (probably the only Soviet purge where everyone was actually guilty of the crimes they were accused of), but that might be for the best.
The final Kronshtadt design is a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, but this is fairly in-keeping with Soviet shipbuilding practices. The Soviets did buy a lot of items in (naval guns from Skoda, boilers and turbines from Switzerland, FC from Italy, etc) because they couldn't make them domestically, or at least not reliably so. Of course they tried to copy the items they brought, but as I hope I explained just having a reverse engineered copy or even a plans is no use if you don't understand them, so often the Soviets had to go back and keep buying things. The rather blood-thirsty knowledge transfer plan is based on what the Soviets did to the engineers who built their tractor factories and hydro-works in 1929-1933, US engineers came over and taught them, who then taught others, then all the first generation were purged during the Great Terror, all a bit grim. In any event the final ships is a bit different from the OTL designs (there was a light 12" armed version and a final version that used German 15" turrets that had been brought under the M-R pact) so there are no actual pictures, but an artistic impression covers many sins.
Finally our hook for the next update, when I will once again attempt to craft an actually interesting and mostly correct update about the thrilling world of marine propulsion.
I can't decide if that is something to look forward to or not.
