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Soviet Submarines type S

The S-class or Srednyaya (Russian: ???????, "medium") submarines were part of the Soviet Navy's underwater fleet during World War II. Unofficially nicknamed Stalinets (Russian: C???????, "follower of Stalin"; not to be confused with the submarine L-class L-2 Stalinets of 1931), boats of this class were the most successful and achieved the most significant victories among all Soviet submarines. In all, they sank 82,770 gross register tons (GRT) of merchant shipping and seven warships, which accounts for about one-third of all tonnage sunk by Soviet submarines during the war.

Project history
The history of the S-class represents quite an interesting turn in warship development. It was a result of international collaboration between Soviet and German engineers that resulted in two different (but nevertheless related) classes of submarines often pitted against each other in the war.

In the early 1930s the Soviet government started a massive program of general rearmament, including naval expansion. Submarines were one key point of this program, but currently available types did not completely satisfy naval authorities. The recently developed Shchuka class submarine was satisfactory, but it was designed specifically for shallow Baltic Sea service and lacked true ocean-going capabilities, and larger boats of Soviet Navy were quickly becoming obsolete.

Thus, government commissioned several engineers to search for a suitable design for a medium-sized ocean-going submarine, and this search soon brought a success. After its defeat in World War I, the German Weimar Republic was forbidden under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles to have submarines or build them in its own yards. Germany circumvented this restriction by creating various subsidiaries of their shipbuilding and design companies in third countries.

One of these proxies, the Netherlands-based NV Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheepsbouw (IvS), a subsidiary of Deutsche Schiff- und Maschinenbau AG-AG Weser, was developing a similar design. The Spanish government, during General Primo de Rivera's dictatorship showed interest for such a submarine for the Spanish Navy. Several German naval officers (including Wilhelm Canaris) visited Spain and struck a deal with a Spanish businessman, Horacio Echevarrieta. A single submarine was built in 1929-1930, and was tested at sea early in 1931, under the manufacturer's designation of submarino E-1, since no navy had yet commissioned the ship

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