ner to traditional land forces and burgeoning
Soviet airpower.
After the war, Gorshkov continued rising
through the Soviet naval hierarchy, becoming
chief of staff of the Black Sea Fleet in 1948, its
commander by 1951. In December 1956, So-
viet Premier Nikita Khrushchev elevated him
to commander in chief of the Red Navy. In
this capacity he began agitating for greater
emphasis on naval construction, but he was
largely ignored by Khrushchev. The premier
felt that the greatest path to Soviet security
lay with the construction of nuclear missiles,
which received the highest priority in defense
appropriations. However, in the wake of the
1961 Cuban Missile Crisis fiasco, whereby the
Soviet Union was forced to remove missiles
from Cuba thanks to an American naval
blockade, Khrushchev’s approach to military
defense became entirely discredited. It be-
came apparent to most Soviet war planners
that more ships were necessary to confront
the United States at sea, as well as to project
Soviet power and influence around the globe.
After Khrushchev was deposed by Leonid
Brezhnev in 1964, the politburo gave Gorsh-
kov free reign to expand Soviet naval capabil-
ities as necessary. He proved just the man for
the task.
The Russian navy has an impressive fight-
ing tradition dating back three centuries to
the time of Peter the Great, and at one point it
even employed the distinguished American
naval commander John Paul Jones. However,
Russia itself is preponderantly a land power,
lacking warm-weather ports for year-round
operations. These historic and geographical
circumstances always militated against the
growth and expansion of naval forces to any-
thing beyond coastal defense. However,
Gorshkov, taking his lead from American
naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, argued
that a large navy is one of the trappings of a
great power. Also, as a superpower, the Soviet
Union faced global responsibilities lying be-
yond the Eurasian landmass. Using great skill
and charm, the admiral overcame centuries of
strategic conditioning and bureaucratic in-
transigence to convince army and air force
leaders that the navy deserved a greater share
of defense appropriations—even at the ex-
pense of building fewer tanks, missiles, and
aircraft. The politburo was swayed by his new
strategy, and over the next 12 years Gorshkov
orchestrated a fourteen-fold increase in the
size of the Red Navy.
Soviet naval expansion was not limited to
surface vessels. For many years previously,
Russia watched in trepidation as American
Adm. Hyman G. Rickover successfully pio-
neered the concept of nuclear-powered sub-
marines. Once armed with nuclear missiles,
they constituted a considerable security
threat to the Soviet Union’s very survival.
Gorshkov therefore placed particular empha-
sis on the development and acquisition of
newer nuclear-powered craft that were capa-
ble of launching nuclear-tipped missiles at
the United States or stalking aircraft carrier
battle groups. Gorshkov, however, did not
favor one weapon type over the other, and by
1970 he began agitating for a balanced, all-
purpose fleet in the mold of the United States
Navy. He therefore promoted new genera-
tions of missile-equipped conventional war-
ships with deepwater capacity for global
cruises. These would prove essential for pro-
jecting Soviet power far beyond Russia’s
landlocked borders—and underscored to the
United States that the world’s oceans were
no longer its domain.
In 1976, Gorshkov codified his theories
into a book entitled The Sea Power of the
States,which was published abroad in several
languages and accorded great respect from
Western naval thinkers. Between 1964 and the
1980s, impressive and numerous Russian
ships plied the seas in regions previously
dominated by Western powers, such as the
African coast and the Indian Ocean. His
buildup of naval assets also triggered alarms
in the United States, which rushed to develop
new classes of submarines and surface ves-
sels to counter them. Heated debate ensued in
Washington when Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt, an-
other nontraditional naval reformer, proposedGORSHKOV, SERGEIGEORGIEVICH