Although the order of battle for the Soviet Navy looked impressive on paper in June 1941, especially in terms of the number of submarines, the results this naval force reaped was quite meager. Aside from pinprick attacks against Axis and neutral shipping, it was only after 1944 that Soviet ships managed to sink a number of Axis ships. Even then, the results of the latter submarine campaign had most of its successes sinking the evacuation ships of Operation Hannibal like the liners Wilhelm Gustloff and General von Steuben. But as great as the losses of life from these sinkings were, they only represented a fraction of the ships being used to evacuate East Prussia and Courland. Overall, the Soviet submarine force proved fairly impotent throughout the war.

One cause of this ineffectiveness was certainly geography. There were four main theaters for the Soviet Navy: the Arctic, the Black Sea, the Baltic, and the Pacific. The swift gains of Barbarossa either occupied or threatened the main ports of the first three arenas. The Germans occupied the building yards of Nikolaev on the Black Sea in August 1941 and put the expansive Leningrad naval works under siege in September. Ice flows and remoteness prevented the Northern Fleet from being a truly effective naval force. This meant that the Soviet Navy was denuded both of secure training grounds, port facilities, and new construction until these areas could be retaken from the Germans. Adding to the Soviet Navy's problems, geography also made it much easier to blockade unoccupied Soviet bases than it was to breakthrough. In the Baltic, expansive German and Finnish mine barrages and nets made sorties out of the Leningrad area a very risky proposition. Soviet naval operations in the Black Sea were more energetic, but German local air superiority meant that it was very difficult for Soviet submarines, MTBs, and other surface craft to disrupt Black Seas convoys. As with the Baltic, Soviet naval forces only managed to accrue successes as the Germans evacuated the area. There was some attempt to transfer ships and personnel from the quiet Pacific zones to the Northern Fleet via the Panama Canal, but such a trek was arduous and necessitated a good deal of resources. Therefore, the Soviet Navy had to make do with the material it possessed in June 1941 as Soviet industry prioritized production of material needed for the land campaigns. The inland Gorkii yard on the Volga was able to construct some small submarines that could be floated along river traffic to the warzones, but this construction could not make up for wartime losses or counteract the geographic disadvantage of operating in narrow waters.

But geography was only one part of the story behind the ineffective submarine arm. Soviet submarines were often qualitatively inferior and often suffered from rushed development cycles. The early interwar submarine construction was often dependent upon foreign expertise, often German, but the advent of Hitler ended much of this technical cooperation. The result as that Soviet naval architects had to put forward designs that were faulty to be constructed at shipyards that were inexperienced with the workmanship needed for operational submarines. Not surprisingly, the most ambitious submarines of the 1930s, the large P-class, proved to be complete failures and were soon relegated to training ships. Soviet naval architects proved better at designing small- and medium-sized submarines, but a number of crewmen did report on faults in these ships. Moreover, Soviet torpedo control and sighting equipment was often faulty or subpar, making successful attacks quite difficult. This helped discourage Soviet submarines from making protracted attacks on heavily defended targets like convoys or warships. Kriegsmarine reports from 1945 indicated that Soviet submarines typically only fired torpedo salvos and then left the area, not pursing their targets.

Soviet naval architects operated under the double burden of not only having to complete design and construction of new ships under the timelines set by the Five Year Plans, but also had to contend with a divided Admiralty that had very little conception of what type of fleet it wanted to be. Soviet grand naval strategy in the interwar period vacillated between coastal defense tied closely to land, a proactive defensive strategy that required light and medium forces to take the fight to the enemy thus leaving Soviet waters secure, and a blue-water fleet that could make Soviet power visible in the oceans. Stalin's own predilections were for a blue-water fleet, but he also at various times pushed for the other two strategies. Each of these strategic visions necessitated different types of ships, as well as adjustments in doctrine, but there was very little attempt to establish order and priorities. Thus the constructed Soviet fleet of the Five Year Plans tried to do too much with little experience at how to accomplish these constantly shifting goals. Massive expansion spread the Soviet naval officer corps quite thin, and the losses from the Great Purges added yet more difficulties. For the Soviet submarine arm, this meant doctrine suffered as submariners often trained for different types of wars and never really became proficient at fighting them.

These shortcomings of the Soviet Navy were already apparent even before Barbarossa. A submarine blockade of Finland during the Winter War proved to be a minor disaster with the loss of the submarine S-2 with no real gains against the outnumber Finnish naval forces. An October 1940 Naval War College report was quite scathing about Soviet submarine performance, claiming that submarine captains were ignorant of procedure, tactics, and came up short compared to the submariners of the tsarist era. The poor performance of the Soviet Navy during the Winter War forced a doctrinal shift away from grandiose blue-water fleet, to a so-called "small war at sea", but this transition was incomplete by the time the Germans invaded. Some Soviet submarines were able to break through the Baltic blockades in 1942 to attack German and Swedish shipping, but these attacks accomplished little aside from prompting the Germans and Finns to beef up their mine defenses. Between 1941-1944, except for light units , the Soviet naval arm atrophied as Stalin was loath to commit the surviving large ships to sortie and naval personnel were fed into the ground attacks or used their ships as mobile artillery platforms. This meant that once the Soviets submarines were able actually take to sea in significant numbers in 1944-45, a lot of their training had gone to seed since Barbarossa.

Sources

Åselius, Gunnar. The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Navy in the Baltic 1921-1941. London: Frank Cass, 2005.

Rohwer, Jürgen, and Mikhail S. Monakov. Stalin's Ocean-Going Fleet: Soviet Naval Strategy and Shipbuilding Programmes, 1935-1953. London: F. Cass, 2001.