Kirov-Class Battlecruiser

The Kirov class, known in Soviet and Russian service as Project 1144 Orlan, is a class of Soviet nuclear-powered guided-missile cruisers, the lead ship commissioned in 1980, commonly described in Western navies as battlecruisers because of their unusually large size for a modern surface warship, roughly comparable in displacement to a small aircraft carrier and far larger than contemporary American or NATO cruisers. Nuclear propulsion, supplemented by conventional boilers for additional power, gives the class an operational endurance limited mainly by crew supplies, and each ship carries an extremely heavy armament for a surface combatant, including large numbers of long-range anti-ship, anti-submarine and surface-to-air missiles intended to let a single Kirov-class ship serve as the heavily armed centerpiece of a Soviet, and later Russian, naval battle group. Four ships of the class were built, but the high cost of operating and maintaining such large nuclear-powered warships left only one, Pyotr Velikiy, in regular active Russian navy service for most of the early twenty-first century, while a sister ship, Admiral Nakhimov, underwent an extended modernization intended to return it to service.