Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaya, having been renamed Svobodnaya Rossiya in 1917, was scuttled in Novorossiysk harbor in 1918 to prevent her from being turned over to the Germans as required by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

They were forced to evacuate the Crimea later that year and sailed with Wrangel's fleet to Bizerte (Tunisia) where she was interned by the French.

This rumor proved to false, but the Russians had decided that they should continue the design process for the time when the Ottomans did procure dreadnoughts of their own.

Preliminary specifications were issued on 12 August 1910[Note 1] for a design based on that of the Gangut-class battleships then being built for the Baltic Fleet.

The Naval Ministry favored the design from the Russud Works and gave preliminary orders for three ships on 2 September, even before the competition was concluded in November.

[3] Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaya was slightly larger than her half-sisters because ONZiV enlarged her in an effort to counter the usual problem Russian battleships had with weight.

[4] Imperatritsa Mariya proved to be very bow-heavy in service and tended to ship large amounts of water through her forward casemates.

Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaya did not suffer from the same degree of trim by the bow by virtue of her greater size and retained her forward guns.

20 mixed-firing triangular Yarrow water-tube boilers powered the turbines at a working pressure of 17.5 atm (1,773 kPa; 257 psi).

Their maximum coal capacity ranged from 1,700 to 2,300 long tons (1,727 to 2,337 t) plus 420 to 630 long tons (427 to 640 t) of fuel oil which gave them a range of approximately 1,640 nautical miles (3,037 km; 1,887 mi) at full speed or 2,960 nautical miles (5,482 km; 3,406 mi) at economical speed.

[7] The main armament of the Imperatritsa Mariya-class consisted of a dozen Obukhovskii 12-inch (305 mm) Pattern 1907 52-caliber guns mounted in four triple turrets distributed the length of the ship.

Three guns per side were situated to fire ahead as that was the most likely direction of attack by torpedo boats as anticipated by the Naval General Staff.

Her sisters shared this problem, which may have contributed to the magazine fire suffered by Imperatritsa Mariya that led to her loss in 1916.

A contract was finally signed on 13 April 1912 with Russud that specified delivery dates of 2 September 1915 for both Imperatritsa Mariya and Imperator Aleksander III.

Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaya was built to a larger design that added over two million gold rubles to her cost and delayed the start of her construction three months after her half-sisters.

On 10 February 1914 changes were ordered by the Naval Ministry to incorporate the lessons learned from the full-scale armor trials conducted using the Chesma.

The construction of Imperator Aleksander III was deliberately delayed in order to accelerate the completion of her two sisters and some of her turrets were transferred to Imperatritsa Mariya as well.

[18] Imperatritsa Mariya (Russian: Императрица Мария, "Empress Maria") was launched on 19 October 1913 and arrived in Sevastopol on 13 July 1915, where she completed her fitting out during the next few months and conducted sea trials.

However, in the chaos of the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War, no further repair work was done, and the ship was scrapped beginning in 1926.

Two of the guns were used in the 30th Coast Defense Battery defending Sevastopol during World War II, also known as Maksim Gor'kii I by the Germans.

[21] Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaya (Russian: Императрица Екатерина Великая, "Empress Catherine the Great") was launched on 6 June 1914 and completed on 18 October 1915.

She was originally named Ekaterina II until 27 June 1915 and was renamed Svobodnaya Rossiya (Russian: Free Russia) in 1917.

She engaged the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben while the latter was in Turkish service as Yavuz Sultan Selim only once, but failed to inflict anything more severe than splinter damage.

The ship did not take part in operations during World War I due to long delays in the delivery of its machinery from Britain, but was able to go to sea by 1917 and conduct a series of trials.

While at Novorossiysk she received an order to scuttle on 19 June 1918, but the majority of the crew refused to do so and decided to return to Sevastopol.

With the collapse of the White Russian armies in Southern Russia in 1920, the battleship assisted in their evacuation to French-owned Tunisia, where she was interned in Bizerte.