The Soviet Navy

Strengths And Liabilities

Bruce W. Watson, Susan M Watson, Calland Carnes, Brian Larson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000305753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Since Admiral Sergei G. Gorshkov was appointed to the office of commander in chief of the Soviet Navy in 1956, the Soviet Union has made a massive investment in naval construction, training, and operations. As a result, the Soviet Navy has grown from a coastal defense force to one of the world's two strongest navies. This book offers a detailed assessment of every major aspect of the Soviet Navy, from fleet structure and training facilities to command and control procedures and warfare and intelligence collection capabilities.

Part 1
The Tradition, the Service, and the People

1
Soviet Naval Tradition

Peter Tsouras

Like the Hydra's teeth, the seeds sown by Admiral Sergei G. Gorshkov's naval expansion have burst from the shipyards of the Soviet Union seemingly ready to challenge an apprehensive West on the high seas. Images of the technological and numerical strengths of today's Soviet Navy crowd out the subtle reality that this shiny new toy of the Soviet Union is rooted in the continuum of Russian-Soviet history and displays inherent, perhaps fatal, weaknesses derived from that tradition.

By any standard, the modern Soviet Navy represents a remarkable organizational and industrial achievement, and the Soviets have every reason to be proud. They see their naval ensign paraded aggressively around the world, undeterred by the ghosts of British glory or the watchfulness of an increasingly nervous U.S. Navy. Having jostled its way to the first rank of navies, the Soviet Navy is all too often judged by the standards of the company that it keeps, which can be a mistake. A navy is not just a collection of ships, men, and deadly weapons—the pieces in a war game. It is a human institution that follows patterns set in its developmental stages by diverse factors of history, culture, and geography. The distillation of these intangible experiences form a navy's character, and this character determines the navy's conduct and success under the ultimate stress of war.

Consistent success and achievement become a tradition of victory that can be the most animating, decisive feature of a military organization. Such a tradition instills pride and confidence and sets the standard that must be kept. Horatio Nelson's message to the fleet at Trafalgar drew upon such a tradition, with crushing effect. The character of the Soviet Navy reflects another tradition, not one of victory, but one of moderate success against regional powers and consistent failure against world-class navies.

Alfred Thayer Mahan said the first element of sea power is a nation's geographical position,¹ and Russia is a perfect example. Since the rise of Muskovy, the physical security and economic survival of the Russian state have been almost wholly dependent upon activities on the Eurasian landmass. Naval considerations, in a strategic sense, have been peripheral, seldom deflecting the land orientation of the Russian-Soviet elites. This situation is a natural outgrowth of Russia's essentially landlocked geography.

The great military lesson of Russian history is that the state's survival has never been threatened from the sea. Sea power cannot effectively pierce Russia's continental mentality. The Mongols, Teutonic Knights, Poles, Swedes, French, and Germans all marched into Russia, so it is no wonder that sea power has not always been a pressing concern for the Russians. Gorshkov ruefully admits, "the Navy of the Motherland developed rather unevenly."²

History has shown that nations that must depend upon the sea for security and livelihood are afforded some measure of protection by that element and tend to use sea power effectively. Athens, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States are good examples. Nations that view sea power as only a further road to aggrandizement tend to fail in using it because it is not an imperative of survival. Spain, France, and Germany are examples of continental powers that have overreached themselves upon the sea. Each has had to choose between continental interests and sea power, and each has consistently declined to sacrifice the former to the latter. Their strategic centers of gravity remain fixed on the continent, and their interests and attention constantly swing back to this center no matter how momentarily distracted they might be by the possibilities of sea power. In the long run, none of these powers have been able to afford both the land commitments of a continental power and the naval commitments of a sea power. As a result, the ambitions of each succumbed to the sea power counterweight that was exercised so deftly by Great Britain for three centuries.

The years since 1956 have witnessed what the Soviets have been pleased to call "the emergence of Soviet power." As in earlier attempts by other countries to dominate the continent, the Soviets have made a determined effort to build a powerful navy. The undertaking has required a great economic commitment, has marked a radical departure in policy and strategy, and has not been without its domestic critics. Admiral Sergei G. Gorshkov found it necessary to defend Soviet naval expansion in a remarkable series of articles appearing in Morskoy sbornik in 1972, entitled "Navies in War and Peace," and in a major theoretical work, Sea Power of the State, first published in Russian in 1976. In both works he attempted to establish the motherland's historical credentials as a legitimate sea power, and he sought to allay fears and silence critics by proving that there exists a naval tradition that is both ancient and a natural outgrowth of Russian-Soviet history.

The force and skill of his advocacy is testament to the importance he attaches to convincing his readership that this naval tradition actually exists. He must recognize that overcoming this psychological hurdle is a crucial milestone in the attainment of Soviet sea power. His dilemma is that he must also recognize that there is very little whole cloth from which to weave the substance of a vital naval tradition. His solution has been to resort to an interpretation of history that is both inaccurate and intentionally misleading. It is worthwhile to review Gorshkov's arguments in order to understand the paucity of a vital Russian-Soviet naval tradition and thereby the magnitude of his historical manipulation.

Gorshkov begins the historical analysis in each of his works by attacking what he considers the pernicious idea that Russia as a continental power could not have interests at sea. He lays the blame for the entrenchment of this calumny in Russian history to foreign propaganda, which has managed to affect generation after generation of Russia's leaders. He avoids the difficulties involved in objective scholarship by labeling the offending idea as a hostile, foreign invention and casts aspersions on the intelligence and integrity of long-dead figures. By extension, he makes a similar attack on contemporary domestic critics who today question the strategic assumption inherent in the rise of Soviet sea power. Receptiveness to foreign disinformation is a very serious accusation in the Soviet Union; Gorshkov is playing bureaucratic hardball.³

It is, however, difficult to explain how the rulers of Russia could have been so consistently gullible as to be duped for almost 400 years by an argument that, according to Gorshkov, was so manifestly not in Russia's interests. These rulers and the men who served under them oversaw the transformation of Muskovy into a state that controlled one-sixth of the earth's land surface. Gorshkov seems to imply a uniquely Russian standard of incompetence since it is doubtful that a tool as useful as Gorshkov asserts sea power to be would have been so consistently overlooked by such rapacious and successful empire-builders.

A Dubious Lineage: Russian Sea Power Before Peter I

Gorshkov begins the chronology of Russia's naval tradition with an account of an Old Slav naval expedition that penetrated the Aegean in A.D. 269 and "crushed Athens, Corinth, and Sparta and reached as far as Crete and Cyprus," stating that "sea navigation and knowledge of sea routes" among the Old Slavs was already highly developed.⁴ Actually, this grand raid was the grim handiwork of the Goths, a decidedly Germanic people. If any Old Slavs participated in this expedition, it was probably as galley slaves as the Slavs at that time were still confined to the forests by stronger nomadic peoples. To enhance the achievement of the Old Slavs, however, Gorshkov grandly cites the names of the ancient cities that were overcome. Rather than being inhabited by the formidable opponents that triumphed at Marathon, Platea, and Salamis, these cities were, in the third century, sleepy and undefended Roman provincial towns that had seen no war for almost 400 years.

Gorshkov ascribes the actual birth of "Russian naval art" to the Slavs who overran many of the Balkan possessions of the eastern Roman Empire in the sixth and seventh centuries. Some of these Slavs established themselves in Macedonia and proceeded to engage in acts of piracy in the Aegean. Using dugout skiffs, theirs was a rather grubby, small-time operation to be the origin of anything as grandiose as naval art.⁵

The next stage in the growth of the Russian naval tradition, according to Gorshkov, is the emergence of the early medieval state of Kievan Rus, its domination of the Black Sea, and its great naval expeditions against the eastern Roman Empire. He cites a statement made by a British authority, Fred T. Jane, in 1904 that the Russians were the greatest and most adventurous sailors of their day. They undoubtedly were, but in that era, the name "Russian" referred to the Swedish Norse. A Norse tribe of merchant adventurers, believed to have been called "Ros," had imposed its rule on the disorganized Slavs, and contemporary historians were referring to these men and their famed seamanship when they wrote about "the Russians."⁶

The Norse were eventually absorbed into the society of their Slav subjects, and the latter's participation in raids greatly increased. It must be emphasized that the Norse naval traditions, while eagerly followed by the Slavicized rulers of Kievan Rus, consistently failed against the first-class naval defenses of Constantinople. The most dangerous threat to the city was made at the apogee of Kievan power by Sviatopolk the Great in A.D. 971, but significantly, his approach was by land through the Balkans. The last Russian naval attack on Constantinople was made in A.D. 1042. The Byzantine fleet was dispersed in campaigns against the Moslems, but the Russians were crushed by a few hastily outfitted triremes and Greek fire ships in a lethal demonstration of tactical and technological superiority. The Russian fleet was so badly beaten that the survivors had to flee by land up the west coast of the Black Sea.⁷

Beginning during Sviatopolk's reign, nomad depredations began to strangle Russian commercial traffic down the Dnieper and, consequently, Russian control of the Black Sea. The Mongol invasion of 1240-1241 was a catastrophe on the scale of a nuclear war. Urban populations were largely exterminated or carried off into slavery, and with them, Russia's commercial orientation as a society died, as well as its relationship with the sea, its legacy from the Norse. The Mongol conquest resulted in a fundamental cultural reorientation of Russian society away from commerce and the sea. Whatever naval traditions the Kievan Russians had established were irrelevant in the subsequent history of Russia.

In spite of this historical watershed, which placed Kievan naval experience in the realm of dim myth, Gorshkov emphasizes that the origin of the Russian Navy predates that of the English Navy under Alfred the Great. He relishes using an English source, Fred T. Jane again, for this statement, but Gorshkov fails to point out that the English Navy was founded for sound strategic reasons while the Kievan navy was chiefly established to carry out grand-scale piracy.⁸ More to the point, Alfred's achievement was the beginning of an unbroken tradition of victory that continuously reinforced itself, whereas the Kievan experience was separated from later Russian history by the Mongol conquest.

The Russia that shook off the Mongol yoke was agricultural, conservative, beset by deadly enemies on every habitable border, and utterly cut off from the sea. From this historical base, modern Russia developed. Gorshkov maintains that through all this time, some 400 years, the Russians retained their seafaring traditions and recognized the need to reestablish sea power. That is asking a lot of a medieval society that was slowly recovering from its brush with extinction. The irony is that the chief Russian contribution to sea power during this period was to provide a multitude of slaves for service in the galleys of the Turkish Navy.⁹

Peter the Great: Reluctant Sailors for a New Navy

Upon this scene burst the dynamic character of Peter I. Excited by a fascination with the sea and its power potential, he bullied and bludgeoned the Russian people into building the second largest fleet in the world in only twenty years. His motives were unfathomable to a people whose world view remained firmly rooted in the past, yet his vision, energy, and absolute power overcame this cultural inertia. With his new fleet, he broke the power of Sweden in the Baltic and aroused the enmity of England. He is a classic example of the effect of an individual upon history, but Gorshkov barely mentions him when detailing the establishment of the Russian Navy. Gorshkov implies that Peter's achievement was due to a collective desire of the Russian people to reach the sea, some innate understanding of sea power.¹⁰ In fact, Peter had to drag the Russian people kicking and screaming to this "heroic" task. They curs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• About the Book and Editors
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures, and Photographs
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 The Tradition, the Service, and the People
• Part 2 Equipment
• Part 3 Operational Capabilities
• Part 4 Operations
• Part 5 The Future
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Contributors
• Index