I'd like to be impressed with this work but for assorted reasons I'm a little underwhelmed. Part of the problem is that while Stalin knew what he wanted in terms of naval hardware, he left little to document why he made these choices, meaning that there's a black hole in the middle of this book. Specialists in other aspects of Soviet history might say take a number. Still, I'm not sure this work is that big of an advance over Jurg Meister's "Soviet Warships," particularly considering the price of the hardcover. There is also my pet peeve that if you're going to charge a premium price for a book the least you could do is avoid typos and mis-spelled words that your average word-processing software would catch. All that said, this work is the best analysis of this period of the Soviet navy; it's just that it's not the last word. ( )