John Schettler - Kirov

And so went the fate of each ship in this unlucky class. The second ship, Frunze, had been renamed Admiral Lazarov, and it lasted no more than ten years in active service before being decommissioned. Kalinin, the third of ship, was renamed Admiral Nakhimov and fared little better, being retired in 1999. As if to avoid the curse, the final ship began as Yuri Andropov and then was renamed Pytor Velikiy, (Peter The Great) in 1992. It continued to serve until 2014 before it, too, was berthed in Severomorsk alongside the aging hulks of its sister ships. This last ship had run afoul of the curse during an exercise much like the one Leonid Volsky was organizing today. The Pytor Velikiy was coordinating live fire exercises with an Oscar II class submarine, when the undersea boat suffered a tragic misfire with one of her torpedoes and exploded taking the lives of all hands on board. And now it seemed the same situation was repeating itself again.

The Kirov class languished for years, laid up and removed from active service, the proud vessels wasting away in the cold northern harbors of Murmansk while the Russians haggled over how to find the money to refit them. But the money was never there. It was not until global circumstances forced the Russians to finally modernize their Navy that the designers and architects again began to draw up plans for an ocean going warship capable of standing with any other ship in the world. One proposal after another was drafted, yet each seemed too grandiose and far-reaching to ever be realized. In the end, the Russians decided that, with four old Kirov class cruisers lying in mothball, they would have enough raw material to refit at least one of these ships by cannibalizing all of the others. And this they did.

Built from the bones of every ship and its class, the new vessel had been given top priority in the shipyards to form the heart of a blue ocean task force that was still under development. Rather than rebuilding the ship from scratch, laying down the keel and working their way up, the ship had been gutted and redesigned from the inside out. The hull was extended and re-metaled, the superstructure modified, up-armored, and fitted out with all the very latest equipment in terms of missiles and sensors in the year 2017. Three years later, after extensive and still costly refitting, it was time to christen the new vessel and commission her into the fleet.

God created the heavens and the earth in just six days, thought Volsky, and on the seventh day he built Kirov. She was an awesome ship when finally completed. Her designers thought it only fitting that she be given back her old name, and they made her the flagship of the new Northern Fleet.

For years the Russian shipyards had turned out little more than a few insignificant frigates and corvettes. But after closely observing modern naval engagements from the Falkland Islands conflict to the wars in the Persian Gulf, Russian planners had decided it was necessary to revitalize their aging fleet with something a little more formidable. The new Kirov was everything they hoped for and more, like a proud old armored knight coming out of retirement in an hour of greatest need. At 32,000 tons when fully loaded, she was one of the largest surface action ships in the world, exceeded in size only by the American supercarriers and the aging Iowa class battleships that were now no more than tourist attractions and well past their day in any case. The Russians had always had a fondness for building things big, and building them strong. Kirov was both.

Officially designated a nuclear guided missile cruiser, Western planners referred to her as a battlecruiser, and in size and scale she was really very much closer to that ship type, which had first entered the naval lexicon during the First World War-a ship with the speed of a fast cruiser, yet the fighting power of something much bigger. At 32 knots, Kirov was as fast as any destroyer or cruiser in the world. Yet her armament was considerably stronger, updated with the very latest in new Soviet technology for both guns and missile systems.

Her primary armament was a potent array of anti-ship missiles that were carried on her long forward deck section. Unable to compete with the West in terms of aircraft carriers, Russia pursued an intensive development in the area of missile technology, and now possessed some of most lethal and efficient anti-ship missiles on earth.

Kirov also boasted the latest in Soviet naval gun technology, twin 152mm guns mounted on their new stealth turret to help lower the radar signature. The gun was the equivalent of a 5.9 inch naval battery, and could fire 30 rounds per minute at a range exceeding 25 kilometers. The day of the big gun was long gone. Even these 152mm turrets would be thought of as typical secondary armament on an old WWII battleship, or the primary guns on lighter class cruisers of that era. Heavy cruisers might carry a bigger 8 inch gun, and the battlecruisers and battleships trumped this with guns firing shells in the range of 11 to 16 inches in diameter. The Japanese behemoth Yamato carried the largest guns in the world at 18 inches, three times as large as those mounted on Kirov. Yet, in her day, the year 2021, no ship mounted bigger or a more potent array of weapons.

For air defense, long-range SAM batteries were augmented by medium range missile defense systems and an array of rapid firing Gatling guns should anything penetrate this defense.

Finally, the ship was also equipped with the latest UGST versatile deep-water homing torpedo, a total of 10 firing tubes, five on each side. This was an extremely dangerous weapon, able to range out as far as 50 kilometers and travel that distance in one hour at its highest speed. As it approached the target, be it a submarine or surface ship, or even the wake of a surface ship, it could home in beginning at a range of 2 kilometers.

The aft section of the ship was also a landing platform for three helicopters. Two KA-40 naval helos could provide over the horizon reconnaissance, radar picket duties, and ASW defense carrying the APR-3 water-jet-propelled torpedo capable of attacking submarines at a submerged depth of 500 meters and KAB-250PL guided depth charges. One KA-226 scout chopper was a modified version of the rescue helo built for the Moscow police, and carried a 30 mm cannon with provisions for air-to-air or surface attack missiles on two stubby wing pods. With a flight endurance of between 4 and 6 hours, the helo mounted HD-optical zoom and infrared cameras, and also had laser range finding. All in all, the battlecruiser literally bristled with weaponry, one of the most powerful surface combatants in the world. Considering the chaos and contradiction of the nation all this had come from, it was a miracle the ship was ever rebuilt.

Admiral Leonid Volsky had sailed her throughout her trials and made two world cruises, showing the flag in ports o’ call all across the globe and again troubling the dreams of many Western naval analysts. Now, in the year 2021, increased tensions had put the Russian Navy on a near wartime footing.

The long fall had swept away Russia’s stilted Soviet political structures, leaving a hard shell of dysfunctional autocracy in its place in the neo-Russia that grew from the ashes. Her armies had diminished, just as the navy had been broken up and sold off to scrap yards, third world countries and even China had picked over the bones, purchasing one of Russia’s two large fleet aircraft carriers from Ukraine after that country inherited the ship from the old Black Sea Fleet. China was still rising, more powerful on the world stage than ever, but Russia never regained her lost glory. She was kept at arm’s length by NATO, shunned by the troubled European Union, and was a strange bedfellow in the new Asian coalition she had tried to forge with China.