The Gnevny-class destroyers began as a compromise. The Soviet Navy wanted fast, cheap escorts to complement its expensive destroyer leaders, so it turned to Italy and licensed plans for an existing design. Soviet engineers then modified the blueprints to suit their needs, and in doing so overloaded a design that was already marginally stable. The result was a class of 29 ships that displaced 1,612 metric tons at standard load and 2,039 at deep load, nearly 200 tons heavier than designed. At 112.8 meters long with a beam of 10.2 meters, they were lean warships meant to cut through seas at 37 knots, though individual ships varied widely in their ability to reach that speed. Some handily exceeded it during sea trials; others fell considerably short.

Retivy's construction history reads like a logistics exercise spanning the full width of the Soviet Union. Major components were laid down at Shipyard No. 198, the Andre Marti South yard in Nikolayev (now Mykolaiv, Ukraine), on 23 August 1936. Those components were then loaded onto railcars and shipped thousands of kilometers east to Shipyard No. 199 at Komsomolsk-on-Amur in Siberia, where the ship was laid down again on 29 July 1937. This practice of building components in the industrialized west and assembling them in the remote east was common for Soviet Pacific Fleet vessels, a workaround for the lack of advanced shipbuilding infrastructure in the Far East. Retivy was launched on 27 September 1939 and commissioned on 10 October 1941, just months after Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

The Gnevny class packed considerable firepower for their size. Four 130mm B-13 guns in superfiring mounts fore and aft provided main battery punch. Anti-aircraft defense included two 76.2mm 34-K guns, two 45mm 21-K guns, and two 12.7mm DShK machine guns. Six torpedo tubes in two triple mounts, each with a reload, gave the class a serious anti-ship capability. The ships could carry 60 to 95 mines and 25 depth charges. Their Mars hydrophones were meant for anti-submarine detection, though they proved useless at speeds above 3 knots, a severe limitation for a class designed around high speed. Two K-1 paravanes rounded out the equipment for mine countermeasures.

Assigned to the Soviet Pacific Fleet upon commissioning, Retivy served through the entirety of the Cold War. She was not decommissioned until September 1991, the same year the Soviet Union itself dissolved. Her fifty-year career spanned the period from the darkest days of World War II through the nuclear age and into the era of guided missiles that made gun-armed destroyers obsolete. Rather than being scrapped, Retivy found a second life at Laohutan Bay in Dalian, China, where she serves as both a museum ship and a training vessel. The bay where she is moored sits just below the Dalian Naval Academy, creating an unexpected connection: a Soviet warship resting in waters that have been home to Russian, Japanese, and Chinese naval forces in turn.