Institutional risk favors an evolutionary test carrier

Failure could carry extreme personal consequences for Soviet officers and engineers. That climate encouraged evolutionary steps backed by visible proof rather than a sudden commitment to an untested large carrier. A Caspian experimental vessel would therefore matter politically as well as technically: it could turn foreign examples and paper studies into domestic operating evidence. Its value would be as a defensible intermediate step before leaders committed major shipyard capacity, budgets, and careers to an ocean-going design.