Admiral Kuznetsov: One Name for a Soviet Commander, a Carrier and a Strait

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This episode starts from an unusual source: a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the name Admiral Kuznetsov, a short list of four links. The first is the man behind the name, Nikolai Kuznetsov, a military officer who lived from 1904 to 1974 and rose to Commander in Chief of the Soviet Navy. His lifespan covered a shift from coal-fired engines and early dreadnoughts to nuclear submarines, ballistic missiles and guided missile cruisers, and reaching the top of the Soviet naval hierarchy meant surviving decades of Cold War politics. The second link is the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, a ship of about 60,000 tons that turned the commander's name into a piece of power projection at sea.

The third entry is the Kuznetsov-class aircraft carriers, a class named after the ship rather than directly after the man, and the episode explains why naming a class matters more than naming a single hull: the class is the design template from which further ships are built. The fourth is the Admiral Kuznetsov Strait, a navigational bottleneck in the harsh Bering Sea, a tribute that will outlast any vessel. The page itself, last edited in September 2018, exists in Dutch and Russian versions and is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.

• Nikolai Kuznetsov's career spanned the years 1904 to 1974, ending as head of the Soviet Navy.
• The carrier Admiral Kuznetsov is described as a floating piece of sovereign territory requiring a crew in the thousands.
• The Kuznetsov class takes its name from the ship, creating a chain from man to hull to blueprint.
• The Admiral Kuznetsov Strait sits in the Bering Sea, known for brutal weather, shifting ice and freezing temperatures.
• The Share-Alike license lets anyone translate and redistribute the page as long as they credit it and keep the same license.