The Ulyanovsk: How the Soviets Tried to Rival U.S. Carriers
Supercarriers have long held the apex of a country’s naval dominance—a rolling announcement of power that can traverse seas. For the Soviet Union, ambition, pride, and the imperative to build an honest supercarrier were all necessitated by the need to catch up with the world’s largest sea beasts.
By the late 1980s, this dream tantalizingly nearly materialized with the Ulyanovsk, a ship that would have made Moscow’s navy a blue-water navy. It is one of the all-time “what-ifs” of war.
The building of Ulyanovsk began in 1988 at the Mykolaiv shipyard. Officially known as Project 1143.7, she was to be equivalent to the largest American carriers. Unlike Admiral Kuznetsov, which used a ski-jump to launch aircraft, Ulyanovsk made use of steam catapults and the capability to launch heavier, loaded aircraft.
She was just under 80,000 tons and 324 meters in length and would have been among the biggest warships ever built. She had four nuclear reactors driving four turbines, propelling her at speeds of up to 30 knots and staying out at sea as long as her crew could survive before she needed to refuel.
Her air group would be formidable: around 70 aircraft comprising Su-33 fighter planes, Yak-44 AWACS planes, and Ka-27 helicopters. Besides the air capability, the ship had also armed P-700 Granit cruise missiles, S-300 surface-to-air, and close-in defense systems, and she became an airborne fortress.
To the Soviet navy, Ulyanovsk was about more than steel and reactors. She was a message—something that could send carrier battle groups to all corners of the globe and extend political and military reach beyond the range of home ports.
Fate had otherwise intended. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s prevented the economic and political will to finish such a megaproject. In 1992, the vessel was merely one-quarter finished.
With the astronomical price tag, the Russian and Ukrainian governments, who had taken over, had no choice but to make the heart-wrenching decision to scrap the half-finished hull on 4 February 1992. The Soviet dream of a supercarrier ended before she had even time to wet her toes.
The shadow of Ulyanovsk hangs over it. Russia has only one carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, already notorious for its breakdowns, fires, and accidents during refit. It is steered under tow with a tugboat equipped as an insurance policy in case of mechanical failure, and serving on her is more a test of endurance than a point of pride.
But never did the vision of a post-Soviet Russian supercarrier vanish. Shtorm, fueled by nuclear reactors, occasionally appears on the drafting board of naval planners, but these are always only sketches for pencil marks, victims of cost and shifting priorities. Ulyanovsk remains as a monument to what might have been—a survivor of abandoned dreams.
Lastly, the lack of an operational carrier limits Russia’s ability to project power over distant seas. World ambition and the requirements of geography, expense, and technology are finally brought into check. The Ulyanovsk, abandoned, incomplete under construction, is greater than the sum of its parts—a story of shattered dreams and criticism of how even the best concepts can be battered down by the waves of history.
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