High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Sovetsky Soyuz class battleships (Project 23, Russian: Советский Союз), also known as "Stalin`s Republics", were a class of battleships begun by the Soviet Union in the late 1930s but never brought into service. They were designed in response to the battleships being built by Germany. Only four hulls of the sixteen originally planned had been laid down by 1940, when the decision was made to cut the program to only three ships to divert resources to an expanded army rearmament program.