Jutland: The Baltic Sea
Russian Battleships, Part One
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2025

Jutland: Baltic Sea is an expansion book for Great War at Sea: Jutland, adding German, Swedish and Russian ships planned but not completed. It’s all brand new, making use of those Swedish and Russian ships in Jutland 2e plus 70 new pieces.

In the early years of the 20th Century, the Russian Baltic Fleet represented a modern, powerful force. And then Tsar Nicholas II personally ordered fleet commander Zinovy “Mad Dog” Rozhestventsky to sail his fleet around the world to fight the Japanese, who sank or captured almost all of his ships.

The war ended with a humiliating peace in September 1905 (it could have been worse; Russian chief negotiator Sergei Witte rolled his Japanese counterpart). In its aftermath, as prisoners returned from Japanese captivity, revolution broke out in Russia’s major cities and the sailors of the Baltic Fleet (what was left of it) joined in. Order was finally restored, and the Tsar’s government could look to rebuilding their naval power.

Two battleships laid down during the war, Andrei Pervozvanny and Imperator Pavel I, continued construction despite the State Duma’s attempt to cancel them, a move vetoed by the Tsar. They had been designed before the war and no updates had been made based on wartime experience, making them badly outdated by the time they commissioned in 1911 (work continued into the next year). They had no portholes, and the terrible living conditions aboard earned them the nickname “Sailors’ Sakhalin” after the notorious penal-colony island.

Andrei Pervozvanny seen in 1912, shortly after commissioning. Note the smooth hull.

A new program for rebuilding the Russian armed forces collected the Tsar’s signature in June 1907. This would be cut back soon afterwards, to feature four new battleships and three new submarines. The State Duma refused to approve even the reduced appropriations, so using the 1908 Bosnian Crisis as political cover, Nicholas overrode them (not a great start for Russian democracy), on the basis that the ships would be financed by French financial credits rather than state taxes (though the state was on the hook for the loan payments). The Baltic Fleet also benefited from Russia’s diplomatic turn towards Britain starting in 1907; that made a war of revenge against Japan less likely, and took away the impetus to build a new fleet of dreadnoughts in the Pacific.

A design contest would be held for the new battleships, in all 51 firms from 13 countries participated. When the Russians chose a German design, their French financial backers objected, and they moved to the second-place entry, from the Baltic Works of St. Petersburg. This ship became the Gangut class of four vessels.

In 1910, Nicholas approved the “Great Shipbuilding Program” which would add eight more battleships, four battle cruisers, 18 modern destroyers and a dozen submarines to the Baltic Fleet. That program’s arrival dovetailed neatly with that of a new commander for the Baltic Fleet, Nikolai von Essen, who took over in December 1909.

Dreadnought Poltava fitting out at Admiralty Shipyard, St. Petersburg, 1912.

Essen had been one of the few Russian officers to emerge from the Russo-Japanese War with his reputation not only intact but greatly enhanced. He commanded the battleship Sevastopol with both skill and daring, and after the war showed great energy reforming and training the fleet’s torpedo flotillas, using the lessons of the just-concluded war. He was 49 years old when he was named Baltic Fleet commander, jumping over many more senior (and far less able) officers. He found the lack of modern ships frustrating, and saw that the slow construction times of Russian shipyards would never bring him the ships he needed to carry out his wartime mission.

Essen knew that the Russians would never have the naval strength to challenge the full German High Seas Fleet, but they could engage in commerce and mine warfare in the Baltic and support the cruisers that carried out those missions with a strong enough battle fleet to force the Germans to detach powerful modern forces from the North Sea in order to counter them.

Those 12 new capital ships of the Great Shipbuilding Program might take a decade to reach the fleet, and Essen wanted them right away. Essen urged his Admiralty to contract with British shipyards for the new ships. British yards completed new dreadnoughts at the fastest pace in the world, at prices only American builders could match. The Russian Admiralty had soured on British builders after the delivery of the armored cruiser Rurik, feeling (probably rightly) that Vickers had sold them an obsolete ship and withheld knowledge that far more capable battle cruisers were under construction for the Royal Navy. Her armored barbettes had to be removed after delivery to address structural problems, and Vickers had balked at replacing her triple-expansion engines with turbines after construction had already begun.

Essen had been Rurik’s first commander (an assignment that also brought him into personal contact with Nicholas II), and argued that the British yard had been prompt in correcting the ship’s defects and that she had been an acceptable warship once the improvements were made. To alleviate concerns, he suggested buying ships already under construction in Britain, either on slipways or to the same design as those ordered by the Royal Navy. With the aid of international arms dealer and man of mystery Basil Zaharoff he re-opened contact with Vickers, obtaining designs for battleships and battle cruisers.

Assembling a main battery turret aboard Poltava.

While Essen apparently had the Tsar’s ear, Russia ultimately did not buy foreign dreadnoughts. But the newly-promoted vice admiral could not overcome the interest of Russian industrialists in such a program. Dreadnoughts bought overseas diverted rubles from their pockets into those of Vickers and Armstrong, and while foreign purchases still had ample opportunities for graft, they also cut out some of the traditional recipients of bribes and kickbacks. Nor did she build those eight promised ships; the Duma backtracked on its appropriation and this time Nicholas gave in: even the original Autocrat admitted that the legislature held the power of the purse.

A new fleet of dreadnoughts would also need base facilities and crews, which Essen set about preparing with his usual energy. Thirty million rubles went to modernize the Admiralty and Baltic shipyards, and another 9 million to the Obukhov Works that made the heavy guns (for comparison, a new Gangut-class dreadnought of the same period cost 37 million rubles). That proved to be a poor investment; much of it went into assorted pockets, and the building speed of Russian shipyards remained glacial.

He had more success on the training front, establishing new schools for officer cadets and specialists in mine warfare, torpedo maintenance, engineering, and other specialties. The Navy already had priority for literate recruits, a rare commodity in Imperial Russia, but that alone was not enough education for the complicated new world of modern warships. Essen’s policy of holding large numbers of men in depots and training establishments, waiting to man ships that would never be completed, helped stoke the 1917 revolution by creating camps filled with armed, trained, disaffected, and most of all, bored young men right on the capital’s doorstep.

Rebuilding proved a slow and painful process, and when war broke out in August 1914 only one modern ship (the armored cruiser Rurik) was ready for action, and she lagged well behind the curve of current ship design. Not until the spring of 1915 were the four new dreadnoughts under construction when the war began fully capable of combat missions, but Essen was dead by then, felled suddenly in May 1915 following a bout of pneumonia brought on by overwork. With him died any thought of using the dreadnoughts offensively.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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