Word: fleets
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Throughout the 19th century, Russia remained the world's third largest naval power (after Britain and France), but it was a largely untested one. The testing came in the 1904-05 war with Japan. In the straits of Tsushima, the Japanese met a fleet of 37 Russian ships and sank or captured all but four of them. It was the last time the Russians fought a naval engagement on the high seas...
...most trusted fighters, but Lenin managed to alienate them. He put in charge of the navy a commissar who was, of all things, a woman, named Larisa Reisner-Raskol-nikova, and refused to allow the sailors to organize their own self-ruling local governments. As a result, the Baltic Fleet suddenly mutinied in 1921. Lenin crushed the revolt, but he never forgave the navy. He demoted it to the inglorious position of "naval forces of the Red Army" and decreed a new strategy that called for only a defensive fleet whose main weaponry would be submarines...
...U.S.S.R. had some 25 subs, but Lenin's successor, Stalin, was dissatisfied with such an invisible fleet. In the mid-1930s, he reinstated the navy as an independent service and started building a huge surface fleet. The Germans captured the partly finished hulks when they swept into Russia in 1941. Thus the mission of defending the Red Army's coastal flanks fell to the Soviet navy's ragtag fleet. Most seagoing men would have chafed at such a coastline assignment, but a young captain named Sergei Gorshkov welcomed it as an opportunity...
During those years, Gorshkov also formed the attachment for heavily armed small craft that is reflected today in the Soviet navy's emphasis on Komar and Osa torpedo boats. He welded the turrets from T-34 tanks to motorboats and formed a river fleet that harassed the Germans from Rostov-on-Don to Vienna on the Danube. The young admiral impressed some Red Army officers who were fighting in the area. One was a major general named Leonid Brezhnev, another a lieutenant general named Nikita Khrushchev...
...decided to put missiles in Castro's Cuba?and the whole game changed. The humiliation of their backdown under the guns of the U.S. Navy impressed on the Soviet leaders the value of naval power. Shortly after the crisis, Khrushchev sent an order to the admiral: Create a surface fleet...