Soviet Thinking We have only limited evidence of the Soviets'' Cold War naval thinking or planning, so what follows is necessarily somewhat speculative. We know that before World War II, a defense-minded Soviet "young school" had argued against an "old school" that wanted the Soviet Union to build a battle fleet (or fleets) to contend for sea control, at the least in contiguous seas. In the 1930s Stalin chose large ships over submarines--but he also approved a very large submarine-building program, including construction of the Gorkiy submarine yard. Stalin approved the initial postwar Soviet building program in September 1945. A Soviet account of the crucial meeting gives little sense of what (if any) naval strategy he had in mind.[i]The Soviets had had the world''s most numerous submarine fleet in 1939, and Stalin may simply have envisaged replacing it.[ii]Much of the prewar fleet consisted of small (M-class) submarines intended mainly for the Far East to counter the Imperial Japanese Navy.[iii]Stalin''s rebuilt submarine fleet incorporated the new technology the Soviets had captured from the Germans, which promised to revolutionize submarine warfare and make Western ASW fleets largely obsolete.
[iv]Stalin stated that he wanted first to build a defensive fleet and then a dominant oceanic fleet. Some analysts have suggested that the numerous new W-class medium submarines were primarily defensive, the larger Z-class submarines being the only Soviet submarines considered suitable for an anti-shipping offensive. A successful open-ocean submarine campaign required some means of ocean surveillance coupled with communication with the submarines. It is difficult to be sure of the intent of the observed Soviet developments. For example, the Soviets built many large HF/DF arrays (Krugs), but whether they were intended primarily to track Western strike groups or Western convoys (or, more likely, both) could never be established. It appears that after Stalin died, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the new defense minister, decided that in a European war the Soviet submarine force would interdict Western shipping.[v] Stalin''s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, initially supported Zhukov.[vi] Soviet naval chief ADM Nikolai Kuznetzov was excluded from a fall 1955 meeting at Sevastopol that set the future course of Soviet naval development.
Khrushchev declared that for the future, submarines and shore-based naval aviation should be the basis of the navy. Zhukov agreed and emphasized attacks against SLOCs (sea lines of communication). The conference decided that naval nuclear weapons were to be adopted and that the main role of the navy would be to disrupt enemy SLOCs. Having recently witnessed the destruction of the old cruiser Krasny Kavkaz by air-launched guided missiles, Khrushchev concluded that surface ships were doomed. Kuznetzov was soon removed from office and replaced by Admiral Gorshkov, who initially agreed with Khrushchev but managed to convince him to allow a few surface ships to be built. In 1957 ADM Vladimir Andreyev explained the wartime role of Soviet submarines as SLOC interdiction.[vii] The numbers envisaged were never reached, perhaps because Soviet policy changed radically within a few years. Khrushchev later wrote that he could not sleep after seeing film of the first Soviet hydrogen-bomb test.
Then he realized that the bomb would deter the West; the global war previously considered inevitable might never happen. Like the Americans and the British, he understood that the East-West conflict would shift to the Third World. To make sure that happened, he would emphasize nuclear/missile forces over conventional ones. Khrushchev proclaimed a Revolution in Military Affairs emphasizing nuclear weapons and missiles--and nuclear deterrence. He feared that any direct conflict could escalate uncontrollably. However, he had to deal with China''s attempt to take over the world communist movement. He supported the North Vietnamese in 1959 only because they shrewdly threatened to support the Chinese in their ongoing fight with the Soviets if he did not. Given Khrushchev''s new emphasis on nuclear weapons and missiles, the large, expensive army in Eastern Europe could be cut back (perhaps also a necessary reaction to the demographic echoes of World War II and the prewar purges).
To enforce his changes, Khrushchev suspended the 1956-60 Five-Year Plan and introduced a Seven-Year Plan (1959-65). In its original form, the Seven-Year Plan called for construction of no fewer than 421 nuclear submarines and 132 diesel submarines, figures never actually approached.[viii] Westerners generally attribute Khrushchev''s fall in 1964 to the failure of his attempt to place strategic missiles in Cuba, but it seems likelier that he fell afoul of those who had been hurt by his disruption of economic (i.e., military) planning. In the Soviet system, industry was tied to politics. Industry managers gained their positions for political reasons. They enjoyed valuable bonuses based on how much they produced.
The drastic change Khrushchev envisioned would inevitably cut production, hence their bonuses. Thus, any attempt to change production goals had political implications. Khrushchev''s successor, Leonid Brezhnev, proclaimed the "stability of cadres," which reassured factory managers that they need not worry about their jobs or sudden changes in their production quotas.[ix] Several Soviet industrial experts said after the end of the Cold War that the Soviet military industrial base became self-sustaining, and justifications for programs became irrelevant. One Russian naval historian explained Admiral Gorshkov''s expansion of the Soviet fleet in just this way, arguing that anyone in his position would have achieved much the same results.[x] The character of the Soviet economy was little understood in the West. It was relatively sluggish, so that the lag between a decision--to design quieter submarines, for example--and its implementation might take a surprisingly long time. Too, the Soviet system was poorly adapted to maintain or modernize equipment.
[xi] One of the great surprises of post-Cold War Russia was that vital systems still in service, such as ASW aircraft, had never been updated, as would have been standard practice in the West. The rigidity enforced by industrial planning probably explains how slow the Soviets were to silence their submarines in the 1970s. Khrushchev''s insistence on the primacy of nuclear weapons survived, however, to the point where the Soviets were generally concerned that crises such as the 1973 Middle East War not be allowed to escalate to the nuclear level. Khrushchev''s logic set the character of the oceanic part of the Soviet navy. If war came, Western nuclear forces, including strike carriers, would be the primary targets. It took time for the change to be understood in the West. Western intelligence gained an idea of what was happening when COL Oleg Penkovskiy provided copies of articles in the Top Secret version of the Soviet official publication Voenny Mysl'' (Military Thought). The journal''s editors raised vital topics connected with Khrushchev''s revolution in turn, inviting articles by highly placed authors before debate was closed.
Naval articles (translations of which are now declassified) made it clear that the new priority targets were nuclear-armed strike carriers. One article pointed to the need for good timing, so that missiles bombers fired at the carriers would not obliterate submarines making torpedo attacks. Penkovskiy''s arrest in 1963 cut off Westerners'' knowledge of the further development of Soviet naval thinking. The cost of the anticarrier force and the nuclear submarine land-attack force was enormous. Construction of submarines suited to an antishipping campaign declined, but previous programs had already produced large numbers of submarines that seemed well suited to just such a campaign. After the United States deployed Polaris submarines, the Soviets made efforts to hunt them. That proved both extremely expensive and, apparently, ineffective. The Polaris hunt was also the first role really appreciated by the political leadership.
That is why so many Soviet ships and other naval projects were given ASW designations. As the Soviets developed their own force of strategic submarines armed with long-range weapons, they came to see them as an essential strategic reserve. This idea was apparently first mooted in public by the creator of the modern Soviet navy, ADM Sergei Gorshkov, in his 1973 book. The protection of that strategic reserve helped justify investment in the Soviet navy; Gorshkov explained that he needed his surface fleet to maintain the "combat stability" of his submarines. Presumably much the same argument applied to Soviet naval air strike forces. Sensitive intelligence indicating the extent of the resources the Soviets thought would be needed to protect their SSBNs during a major war was a great surprise for the U.S. Navy in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Presumably the Soviets were aware of U.S. and British success in trailing their SSBNs. They could not expect their SSBNs to survive in the open sea, so the submarines would instead shelter in protected bastions in the White Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk. This in itself was not a surprise; the concentration of SSBNs in the bastions had been observed. What seems to have been shocking was the extent to which the bastions would be protected. It seemed that bastion protection would absorb so much of the Soviet fleet as to preclude other operations, such as attacks on the transatlantic SLOCs. This revelation did not, of course, predict what the Soviets might do in a local war, for example in the Mediterranean; but it did indicate that continuing pressure on the bast.