The Russian and Soviet Navy's ship naming conventions were similar to those of other nations. A problem for the non-Russian reader is the need to transliterate the Cyrillic names into the Latin alphabet. There are often several different Latin spellings of the same Russian name.

Pre revolution

Before the revolution, the Imperial Russian Navy used the following convention:

Battleships

Russian Battleships were named after:

Cruisers

Russian Cruisers were named after:

Destroyers

Russian destroyers were named after adjectives: e.g. Burnyi = Stormy, Smeliy = Valiant

Frigates/Gunboats

Submarines

Named after fish or animals – e.g., Morzh = Walrus, Akula = Shark

Soviet times

Renaming

The Soviets changed the names of many ships after they took power in 1917.

New construction

Post War

Project(design) designations (design names)

The Soviets assigned a project number to each new design. The numbers were non sequential, submarine designs had numbers 600-900, small combatants 100-200 and large ships 1000 plus. The designs also had covernames, major ship classes were named after birds, e.g., Orlan = Sea eagle, Berkut = Golden eagle, Krechyet = Gyrfalcon. Submarine designs were given fish names, e.g., Akula = Shark, Som = Catfish, etc.

NATO naming

Also see NATO reporting name NATO assigned its own reporting names to Soviet ships. This was because the official Soviet designation was unknown.