The Soviet Union's difficult carrier-aviation learning curve

The Soviet Union began its post-war carrier effort with little practical carrier-operating heritage and a strong institutional tradition of explaining why carriers were unnecessary. Moskva and Kiev were early vehicles for rebuilding that knowledge, and Kuznetsov carried the effort into a more capable fixed-wing form. Decades of treating the absence of carriers as a virtue had allowed misunderstandings about carrier operations to reinforce themselves. Later Western histories can inherit those assumptions when they rely on Soviet analytical sources without re-examining them.