Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #946805 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-15
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 528 pages

Synopsis
Covering the period 1869-1960, this volume provides an overview of Russian and Soviet battleships. It describes the design histories, technical innovations, characteristics, and service histories of 40 naval vessels. Approximately 100 drawings and design studies illustrate the details of the ships, alongside another 100 photographs. McLaughlin is a

Customer Reviews

A reliable book at long last
This review is a little late as i've had this for a couple of years. The author is well known for his many contributions in Warship and other periodicals and yearbooks over the years. He has taken his source material as usual, primarily from Russian language sources and has even studied the language itself! The shelves of libraries rarely cover this material and where found the subject matter is often full of errors and misconceptions. These are often reproduced in new literature until they seem to become facts and I hope Mr McGoughlin's book goes someway to redress the bad habit of fiction and hearsay. Essentially the work sets out to descibe the 40 battleships of the Imperial Russian and Soviet Navy that often led remarkable careers. From the Ironclad Petr Veliki to the Sovietski Soyuz class every vessel or class is described in great detail and the design process gone through from the original designs to the completed [in some case not] vessels. The author makes his apologies for only covering the seaging vessels so we do not have the early ironclads, monitors, circular ships, coast defence battleships or the later large cruisers. The book is illustrated with many plans and diagrams as well as a selection of good black and white photographs. There are some small errors and an incorrect photo caption but an extensive list of errata written by the author is out on the net. I found of particular interest the battleship designs and projects that often did not see the light of day. In conclusion I would recommend this book for any serious historian or ship lover as it takes the designers of these fascinating ships seriously. We are often given the illusion that they were crewed by illiterate peasants led by white haired old admirals but it seems that by the First World War these ships were part of task groups often playing a supporting role to small carrier forces that pre dated the USA by some quarter of a century. Similarly the shiyards were turning out highly sophisticated vessels much more quickly than previously realised. All in all a rivetting read about ships caught up in the major conflicts and revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century and I hope the author keeps his promise to cover other ships in the future, Steve Bradley

A new perspective on the battleship era
When talking about the Russian Empire one tends to forget that it had a coastline even longer than the one of the USA, and was spread between three oceans - the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Pacific. Why isn't Russia recognized as a true maritime power, then?

A look at the map shows the reason: Russia was (and still is) actually a continental empire, its vastness stretching from Europe - where it competed with highly industrialized (and militarized) neighbors - to the Far East where it had to deal with mostly feudal states which, apart from Japan, had few ambitions outside their own territories. (That Russia's navy finally had to fight a war on this front, with ships actually built to entirely different requirements of entirely different theaters, was tragic and, to a certain degree, unavoidable.) This continental empire spanned all of Asia and some of Europe, its trade routes were over land and there was little incentive to build a fleet other than for purely defensive purposes - for the defence of Russia's own coastline, that is.

Russia's strategic situation meant it had to deal with two maritime threats. The first, and more imminent one, was the prospect of an English (or, later, a German) fleet blocking the Baltic and attacking Russia from the North-West, supporting an Army thrust into Russia through Poland and White Russia. Russia didn't care much about its own merchant ships to leave the Baltic - maritime trade was far less in quantity and revenue than the one over land - but considered the Baltic as home waters for defensive reasons.

The other theatre of interest was the Black Sea. Here, the situation was different. Port Cities on the Russian and Ukrainean cost line were major outlets for Russian products and equally important for imports to Russia. Other than the Baltic these ports never froze and could serve Russia all year round. However, the Osman Empire controlled access to the Black Sea and could easily block Russia's maritime trade with the Mediterranean - which was traditionally an important market for Russia. A fleet based in the Black Sea therefore not only had the task of coastal defence, its main purpose was to force the Dardanelles to stop a blockade of the South-Russian ports.

The different requirements meant the gestation of vastly different types of battleships for both the Baltic and the Black Sea, and the Dockyards at St. Petersburg and Sevastopol turned out a surprising quantity of them. All in all, forty seagoing battleships were built for Russian and Soviet Navies, and this book, for the first time ever, gives an English language account of all of their construction and (sometimes tragic) careers. It also gives quite a lot of background information and sheds light on the political and economical structures and strictures of the Russian Empire. And it shows that - despite these ties - the Russian naval engineers often came up with surprisingly good and state-of-the-art solutions, quite different from the backwardness Russian engineering has been blamed for in the West for so long.

The book, based largely on research in primary sources (complemented with some Russian books and articles), follows the traditional approach of class-wise treatment, interspersed with chapters on political, economical, social and scientific circumstances influencing Russia's naval policy. Thus structured, it is highly readable, even if the treatment of some topics remains kind of cursory at times. I felt compensated, however, by the wealth of images, some often shown for the first time in the West, and by the drawings which are first class. (For a modeler they lack a bit detail, though, and there are many more side elevations than deck plans - which means that a first-rate resource for modelers is still waiting to be compiled.)

I recommend this well-researched, well-written and well-manufactured book for the naval enthusiast with an interest in battleships or in the history of the Russian navy beyond Tsushima (or both).