Triumph in World War II settled any argument over who controlled the Black Sea, and with NATO at Russia’s doorstep there was a powerful incentive to militarise the whole region
With Europe split into armed camps – Moscow’s satellites under the Warsaw Pact formed in 1955, after the former Western Allies coalesced under NATO – a frenzied reconstruction took place in the Ukraine SSR and its waters. By the 1950s the Black Sea was transformed into a garrison of such intimidating size that even Turkey, which joined NATO in 1952, could not challenge it, except through a secretive agreement for American nuclear weapons to be kept in its territory from the late 1950s onward. The Turks had many reasons to be wary of the Soviets, with not only Moscow’s bombers and the Black Sea Fleet hours away from the Anatolian coast, but also Soviet divisions in Armenia and Georgia on its eastern border.
Under Soviet policy an industrial belt from Mariupol to Odesa stretched across the Black Sea coast, with the mines of the Donetsk basin supplying raw materials for the gargantuan factories that employed whole towns. Foremost among them was the shipyard of Nikolaev (Mykolaiv), named after the city on the bend of the Dnieper River. The shipyard and its output was so immense it could no longer turn a profit after the USSR collapsed in 1991 and was declared bankrupt from 2018 until 2020. Looking at the development forced upon the Black Sea coast and the Azov Sea, the decision by Premier Nikita Khrushchev to transfer Crimea’s administrative boundaries to Ukraine in 1954 makes sense, especially given his fondness for the republic and its people. Since the heavily industrialised Ukrainian oblasts in the south and southeast were linked by road and rail to the ports in Odesa and Crimea, having them under the administration of Kiev (Kyiv) streamlined the Soviet central planning in areas such as grain exports and national defence.
From the 1950s the rehabilitated Black Sea Fleet grew to an unprecedented size; according to NATO assessments in the 1970s it had 19 submarines and 77 surface vessels, including minesweepers and landing craft. The re-emergence of submarines in the fleet – the Whiskey- and Romeo-class dieselpowered models – meant the Soviet presence in the Black Sea region was uncontested. To accommodate these vessels a hardened submarine base was constructed east of Sevastopol along the cliffs near Balaklava.
This semi- clandestine submarine base could only be accessed through a tightly guarded channel and had individual bunkers for each hull. The fact that it was carved from under a mountain was another contingency of the time. If a nuclear war broke out the Black Sea Fleet’s su
