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Russian Ship Naming Conventions
Russian Ship Naming Conventions
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Russian and Soviet Navy's ship naming conventions were similar to those
of other nations. A problem for the non-Russian reader is the need to
transliterate the Cyrillic names into the Latin alphabet. There are often several
different Latin spellings of the same Russian name.
Pre revolution[edit]
Before the revolution, the Imperial Russian Navy used the following convention:
Battleships[edit]
Russian Battleships were named after:
Soviet times[edit]
Renaming[edit]
The Soviets changed the names of many ships after they took power in 1917.
NATO naming[edit]
Also see NATO reporting name
NATO assigned its own reporting names to Soviet ships. This was because the
official Soviet designation was unknown.
Initially surface ship classes were named after the place where they
were first identified, e.g. Kotlin, Poti etc. It soon became apparent that
this convention would rapidly become obsolete as the Soviet Union
had only a limited number of naval bases and shipyards. A new
convention based on vaguely Slavic sounding names beginning with
the letter K for "korabl" ("warship" in Russian naval usage) was then
used.
Fast patrol and torpedo craft classes were named after the Russian
name for insects e.g. Osa=wasp. The Soviets also actually named
their missile boats after insects leading to confusion.
Minesweepers and small frigates were given diminutive first names
e.g. Alyosha, Vanya, Petya
Hovercraft were named after Russian words for birds e.g. Aist = Stork
Submarine classes were given Phonetic alphabet names e.g. Delta,
Alfa, Victor etc. When the letters of the Phonetic alphabet had all
been assigned, Russian words, primarily for fish, were used. As with
missile boats, this led to confusion as the same Russian word could
be both the official Soviet designation of one submarine class and the
NATO reporting name of a different one. For example, Akula (shark)
was both the NATO reporting name for an attack submarine and the
Soviet designation of a ballistic missile submarine.