RUSSIA: Rumors

The gossip in Swedish seaports last week was that the 35,000-ton Sovietsky Soyuz (the Soviet Union), the U.S.S.R.’s first battleship, was making trial runs in the eastern Baltic. It was the first report heard by the Western world since January, when word came over the seamen’s grapevine that the ship had been commissioned.

The Soyuz’ keel was reportedly laid in 1935 along with those of two sister battleships, Trety Internatsional (the Third International), launched this year and still being fitted out, and Sovietskaya Ukraina (the Soviet Ukraine), not yet off the Leningrad ways.

The shrewd-guessing British yearbook, Jane’s Fighting Ships, passes along a rumor that the keels of two other battleships, Strana Sovietov (the Country of Soviets) and Sovietskaya Belorussia (the Soviet White Russia), were laid in Archangel in 1942 and that these ships, which apparently had a higher priority than the first three, have been in commission a year.