ABSTRACT
In January 1936, together with his colleague Flagman Orlov at UVMS, the chief of the RKKA General Staff, Marshal Alexander Yegorov, presented a new naval construction program which signified the beginning of the Soviet School. All in all, the program contained 676 ships (among them 24 battleships, 20 cruisers, 199 destroyers and 344 submarines), with a total tonnage of 1.727 million tons. The marshal and the flagman had seemingly overcome traditional service rivalry, as Yegorov’s original proposal had even been more ambitious than Orlov’s, containing six aircraft carriers and a total tonnage of 1.868 million tons. In June the same year, the Soviet government approved a modified version of their joint proposal, containing 533 ships at 1.307 million tons. Orlov first made the great oceanic naval program public to the world in a speech at the extra-congress of Soviets, which had convened in Moscow in late November 1936 to approve the new Soviet Constitution. The Baltic Fleet was to have eight of the 24 new battleships. Four of these were to be of type A on 41,500 tons – to comply with the regulations of the Washington treaty their displacement was officially stated as 35,000 tons – and four of type B on 26,000 tons. In addition came six light cruisers, 44 flotilla leaders and destroyers and 78 submarines of various sizes.1
