Tsushima left the Russian battle fleet devastated just as HMS Dreadnought was about to redefine naval warfare, making the subsequent rebuilding effort an unusually awkward mixture of ambition, industrial limitation, and institutional panic. The discussion does a good job of establishing that background before reaching the ships that eventually served under Soviet control, explaining why Russia pursued new dreadnoughts despite arguments for a smaller coastal-defence force. That wider context is valuable because the later Soviet fleet makes considerably more sense once its inherited origins are clear.
The pre-revolutionary material is dense but useful. The Gangut and Imperatritsa Mariya classes are presented as ambitious attempts to restore Russian prestige, with their twelve 12-inch guns and broadside-focused layouts contrasted against weaknesses in armour, speed, construction efficiency, and industrial capacity. The aborted battleships and battlecruisers also reinforce an important theme running throughout the feature: Russian and later Soviet naval planning repeatedly exceeded the resources available to execute it. Some of the rapid lists of ship names become difficult to absorb, however, particularly when multiple vessels are introduced before disappearing through scrapping, scuttling, seizure, or abandonment.
The upheaval surrounding the revolution and civil war is where the narrative becomes especially effective. Capital ships change hands, crews mutiny, incomplete vessels acquire new names, and ships that once represented imperial prestige deteriorate into floating liabilities. The strange afterlives of their components are often more memorable than the ships themselves, including main guns reused for harbour defence or railway artillery. These anecdotes give the history personality without losing sight of the broader collapse that reduced a substantial imperial fleet to only a handful of usable battleships.
Once the surviving dreadnoughts take centre stage, the engineering discussion becomes one of the feature’s strongest elements. Sevastopol, Petropavlovsk and Gangut underwent extensive but notably different reconstructions involving oil-fired boilers, revised bows, altered funnels and superstructures, new fire-control equipment, reinforced armour, anti-aircraft additions, and attempts to improve underwater protection. Particularly worthwhile is the explanation that these modifications involved trade-offs rather than straightforward improvement: added armour affected stability, fuel conversion changed the assumptions behind torpedo protection, and corrective bulges created their own performance penalties. The presentation is humorous, but the underlying picture of iterative, resource-constrained modernization remains clear.
Their Second World War careers also support the central argument better than the opening jokes might suggest. Parizhskaya Kommuna provided repeated bombardment support in the Black Sea before worn gun barrels and the growing air threat effectively confined her to safety. Marat suffered catastrophic bomb damage and more than 300 deaths, yet her surviving stern was salvaged and reused as a stationary artillery platform during the defence of Leningrad. Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya survived repeated bombing and continued providing fire support into 1944. On the evidence presented here, calling these ships highly capable modern battleships would be difficult, but portraying them as entirely useless relics would be equally misleading.
The historical presentation would nevertheless benefit from firmer discipline in places. Numerous dates, casualty figures, weapon characteristics, political episodes, engineering details, and reported anecdotes are delivered rapidly, often alongside phrases such as “allegedly,” “it’s reported,” or jokes about conflicting sources. That wording appropriately signals uncertainty in some cases, but the feature generally does not identify the underlying evidence or explain where historiographical disputes begin. The comedy also periodically becomes intrusive, with extended ridicule, exaggerated descriptions, and modern references interrupting serious subjects such as executions, mutinies, wartime deaths, and political repression.
Its final distinction between Soviet-operated battleships and genuinely Soviet-built battleships is especially important. Royal Sovereign and Giulio Cesare are deliberately excluded because they were foreign-built acquisitions, while the surviving dreadnoughts themselves were inherited from the Russian Empire. Consequently, the USSR described here never actually completed a battleship of its own construction. That clarification prevents the retrospective label “Soviet battleship” from obscuring what is really a story about old imperial hulls repeatedly rebuilt, renamed, damaged, repaired, and forced into roles their original designers could scarcely have anticipated.
Pros
- Establishes the post-Tsushima and pre-revolutionary naval background needed to understand why the later Soviet battle fleet was so unusual.
- Detailed reconstruction sections explain meaningful engineering changes involving boilers, armour, stability, fire control, anti-aircraft weapons, and torpedo protection.
- The contrasting careers of Sevastopol, Marat, and Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya demonstrate how aging dreadnoughts remained militarily useful despite severe limitations.
- Marat’s salvage and continued use as a floating artillery battery provides an especially strong example of Soviet improvisation under wartime pressure.
- Clearly distinguishes Russian-built inherited ships from foreign battleships later transferred to Soviet service.
- Numerous strange operational details and component afterlives make a complicated naval history memorable.
Cons
- Long sequences of ship names, renamings, seizures, and disposal histories can become difficult to follow.
- Many precise historical claims and reported anecdotes are presented without enough sourcing context to judge their certainty.
- Frequent jokes and exaggerated phrasing sometimes interrupt serious discussions of executions, casualties, mutinies, and wartime destruction.
- The long imperial and civil-war preamble delays the examination of the three dreadnoughts that ultimately form the strongest part of the feature.
- Rapid delivery occasionally compresses complicated modernization decisions and political events that would benefit from more careful explanation.
A surprisingly substantial history emerges from ships that were already aging before the Soviet Union existed, with their repeated reconstruction and wartime improvisation proving more interesting than their reputation as obsolete relics suggests. The dense chronology and aggressive humour occasionally work against clarity, but the engineering detail and contrasting operational careers make the central reassessment convincing on the evidence presented.
