These vessels were primarily designed to protect Soviet surface fleets and to attack American ballistic missile submarines.

They had similar armament to the Victor I class and were the first Soviet submarines to introduce raft mounting for acoustic quieting.

The Victor III class caused a minor furor in NATO intelligence agencies at its introduction because of the distinctive pod on the vertical stern-plane.

Speculation immediately mounted that the pod was the housing for some sort of exotic silent propulsion system, possibly a magnetohydrodynamic drive unit.

[citation needed] In the end, the pod was identified as a hydrodynamic housing for a reelable towed passive sonar array;[6] the system was subsequently incorporated into the Sierra and Akula-class SSNs.