The Soviet Navy envisioned building 13 Kiev class ships in 1937 during the Third Five-Year Plan and then proposed 30 ships in its shipbuilding proposal in August 1939, but the government decided to only build half that number, with twelve in the first part of the five-year plan and two in the latter part.

On 19 October 1940, the government reevaluated the shipbuilding program in light of the changing international situation and canceled all ships that had not yet been laid down.

A contributing factor in this decision may have been the Project 35 large-destroyer design scheduled for 1941 which was intended to have a dual-purpose main armament and much greater range.

The turbines, designed to produce 90,000 shaft horsepower (67,000 kW), were intended to give the Kievs a maximum speed of 42 knots (78 km/h; 48 mph).

[4] The main armament of the Kiev-class ships consisted of six 50-caliber 130-millimeter (5.1 in) B-13 guns in three twin-gun B-2-LM turrets, one superfiring pair forward of the superstructure and the other mount aft of it.

[2][6] In July 1941, the shipbuilding program was reevaluated in light of the Axis invasion the previous month and both Kiev and Erevan were to be continued.

The stability of the proposal was so limited that the latest gunnery radar could not be fitted and the ships were competing for resources with the Project 30-bis Skoryy-class destroyers of a similar size already being built.

Ultimately, the navy decided that it did not need a pair of unique ships with their own special maintenance and training requirements and canceled all further development in 1950.

Sometime after 1960, Kiev returned to the Black Sea where she was sunk in 1962 during the testing of P-6 anti-ship missiles (NATO codename: SS-N-3 Shaddock).