Stalingrad

History: After the war, d'Aosta was inactive. On 2 March 1949, transferred to the Soviet Union as Z15. She was first renamed as Stalingrad, then as Kerch and served with the Soviet Black Sea Fleet until she was stricken on 20 February 1959 and scrapped in the 1960s (possibly 1960).

Class: The Condottieri class was a sequence of five, different, light cruiser classes of the Regia Marina (Italian Navy), although these classes show a clear line of evolution. They were built before World War II to gain predominance in the Mediterranean Sea. The ships were named after military commanders (condottieri) of Italian history. All ships served in the Mediterranean during World War II. Each class is known after the first ship of the group.

The ships of the first two subclasses (with the exception of Cadorna) were all lost by 1942, primarily to enemy torpedoes (with Colleoni sunk by destroyers at the Battle of Cape Spada after being crippled by HMAS Sydney, da Barbiano and da Giussano suffering a similar fate at the Battle of Cape Bon, and Diaz sunk by a submarine), which led to many authors (including Preston) to question their real value as fighting ships. However, the subsequent vessels fared considerably better with all, except Attendolo (sunk by an Allied bombing in December 1942), surviving the war.

After the end of the war, the Eugenio di Savoia and the Duca d'Aosta were given respectively to the Greek Navy and the Soviet Navy as war reparations; the Cadorna was quickly stricken, the Montecuccoli became a training ship, and the two Abruzzi served on in the Marina Militare until the 1970s, with Garibaldi becoming in 1961 the first European guided missile cruiser.

Nationality: The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. Nominally a union of multiple equal national Soviet republics, its government and economy were highly centralized.