Maxim Gorky improves range and protection

Maxim Gorky represents an incremental improvement, with greater displacement, longer cruising range, thicker 70 mm protection in key areas, and a strengthened wartime anti-aircraft battery. She and a destroyer lost their bows in a German minefield while covering Soviet minelaying, but the cruiser reached port and received a replacement bow. Blockaded at Leningrad for much of the war, she became a heavy gunfire-support platform for the defenders. She fired hundreds of 180 mm shells during the 1941 defense and the 1944 Krasnoye Selo-Ropsha offensive, then also bombarded Finnish positions during the Vyborg-Petrozavodsk offensive. Reinforcing her upper deck after repeated air attack shows how combat experience drove further protection changes.