The Soviet Cruiser ‘Kaganovich’ Navigated Political Purges

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By Robert Beckhusen,War Is Boring

In 1938, the Soviet Navy laid down the Kaganovich, the fifth of six Kirov-class cruisers. Survivors of World War II, the Kirovs were responsible for mine-laying operations in the Baltic Sea and escorting troop ships reinforcing the besieged Black Sea port city of Sevastopol.

The cruisers represented the Soviet Union’s return to constructing powerful surface combatants following the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War, which badly damaged the Soviets’ shipbuilding industry. The Italian company Ansaldo provided blueprints for the Raimondo Montecuccoli-class cruiser the early 1930s, which formed the basis for the Kirovs.

But Kaganovich would not end service as the Kaganovich. Named after a high-ranking and doctrinaire Stalinist bureaucrat and one of the chief architects of the Ukrainian famine, the cruiser would undergo several awkward name changes due to the bloody, internecine feuding characteristic of the Stalinist era and its immediate aftermath.

Kaganovich was technically a “Projectbis2” upgrade of the Kirov class, which included the cruisers Kirov, Voroshilov, Maxim Gorky, Molotov and the fellow bis2 upgrade Kalinin. Kaganovich and Kalinin were larger than their sisters at 8,267 long tons displacement, with beefier turbines capable of getting the cruisers up to a speedy 36 knots.

The Soviets also adapted the Italian design to more rugged, given the harsher climactic conditions to which Soviet ships were exposed.