Assigned to the Baltic Fleet in August, the ship was limited to service as a floating battery to provide naval gunfire support for the Red Army during the Siege of Leningrad with frequent periods in reserve or under repair.

After his appointment as director of the Soviet Navy's surface-ship design office in 1931 and the struggle to save weight with the design of the Gnevny-class destroyers in 1933–1934, he conceived of a smaller destroyer using this type of advanced propulsion machinery that would be much faster than the Gnevny class.

[2] Bzhezinsky intended the ship to serve as a prototype to test the straight-flow, high-pressure boilers developed by Leonid Ramzin.

To save weight, welding was extensively used for the internal structure with traditional riveting limited to the hull plates.

More weight savings would accrue from auxiliary machinery working on high-pressure steam and electrical equipment using alternating current.

The Soviets expected significant savings from the fuel-efficient boilers and the ship's range was anticipated to be 3,200 nautical miles (5,900 km; 3,700 mi) at 18 knots (33 km/h; 21 mph).

[6] Launched on 8 December, further work was delayed by major problems with components that were not designed to be used with high-pressure steam or alternating current and the lengthy amount of time required to redesign the ship to accommodate devices that used low-pressure steam and direct current.

Similarly her radius of action proved to be a major disappointment as her maximum capacity of 372 metric tons (366 long tons) of fuel oil only gave her a range of 1,370 nautical miles (2,540 km; 1,580 mi) at 18 knots (33 km/h; 21 mph), less than half of what expected.

Its shells weighed 0.732 kilograms (1.61 lb) and were fired at a muzzle velocity of 880 m/s (2,900 ft/s) to a range in excess of 4,000 meters (4,400 yd).

It included a TsAS-2 mechanical analog computer that received information from a KDP2-4 gunnery director on the roof of the bridge[12] which mounted a pair of DM-4 four-meter (13 ft 1 in) stereoscopic rangefinders.

Anti-aircraft fire control was strictly manual with only a DM-3 three-meter (9 ft 10 in) rangefinder to provide data to the guns.

[11] The ship was renamed Opytny on 25 September 1940 and was scheduled for her final sea trials in June–August 1941, but the Axis invasion disrupted those plans.

[12] Not long afterwards, Opytny suffered significant damage from German artillery fire[14] and was under repair from November 1941 to August 1942.