The boats were assembled at the Baltic Shipyard in Saint Petersburg and its subsidiary in Nikolayev by the Black Sea (now Mykolaiv, Ukraine).

[3] In 1920, one (AG 22) was taken over by the Russian White movement, eventually evacuating to Bizerta with Wrangel's fleet and five were taken over by the Red Army after the Civil war.

During World War I, the Russian subs operated together with the British submarine flotilla in the Baltic against the German Navy.

In 1918, the German occupation of Tallinn and the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty forced the British flotilla to move to Helsinki, then under the protection of the Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic.

Extensive plans were made to refurbish them, but the strained economic situation of the 1920s and the new shipbuilding program of the 1930s finally led to their scrapping.

The most significant victory of this old class of submarine was the sinking of Romanian merchant SS Sulina (3495 GRT) achieved by the same A-3.