 The Sovetsky Soyuz @-@ class battleships ( Project 23 , Russian : <unk> <unk> , " Soviet Union " ) , also known as " Stalin 's <unk> " , 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 <unk> program . 
