Smyshlyony was one of eighteen destroyers of the Project 7U design, and her design was shaped by a hard lesson. She began life as a simpler Project 7 ship, but Joseph Stalin himself ordered the class rebuilt so that their boilers sat en echelon, staggered along the hull rather than grouped together, so a vessel could still steam if one or two boilers were knocked out. It was a modification meant to keep ships alive under fire. Laid down at a Nikolayev shipyard in 1936 as Polezny, she was relaid to the new design, launched in 1939, and renamed Smyshlyony in 1940. She carried four 130-millimeter guns in superfiring mounts, six torpedo tubes, and dozens of mines and depth charges. Her hull, though, was known to be weak, and even a storm could leave it dented, a flaw that would matter when the sea turned against her.

Smyshlyony went to war within days of the German invasion in June 1941. Assigned to the Black Sea Fleet, she helped cover the withdrawal of the Danube Flotilla toward Odessa, then spent the punishing months of the sieges of Odessa and Sevastopol doing the unglamorous, vital work of a warship under pressure. She ran reinforcements and supplies into the encircled cities, carried out the wounded and refugees, and shelled Axis positions ashore. She threw up anti-aircraft fire against German bombers time and again, escorted convoys through dangerous water, and in the winter of 1942 bombarded enemy batteries and troops near Feodosia while supporting a diversionary assault at Alushta. Hers was not a story of famous single battles but of relentless service, the daily grind of keeping a besieged coastline supplied and defended through one of the war's grimmest campaigns.

The end came by accident. After escorting a reinforcement convoy to Kerch, Smyshlyony was steaming back toward Novorossiysk on 6 March 1942 when she strayed into a Soviet minefield near Zhelezny Rog. The mine flooded two boiler rooms and cut her power, but her crew jury-rigged repairs and coaxed her homeward at a crawl, in company with the destroyers Tashkent and Kharkov. It was not enough. Unstopped leaks crept through her hull, the storm foiled every attempt to take her under tow, and through the night of the seventh she settled lower and lower until she went down by the stern. The detonation of her depth charges as she sank turned a slow disaster into an almost total loss of life. Two survivors. It is worth pausing on that number, and on the men behind it, sailors who had run the gauntlet of the sieges only to die in home waters, undone by their own defenses.