List of battleships of Russia and the Soviet Union

Several months after the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War in February 1904, she was assigned to the 2nd Pacific Squadron to relieve the Russian forces blockaded in Port Arthur.

Immediately after sea trials, Sissoi Veliky sailed to the Mediterranean to enforce the naval blockade of Crete during the Greco-Turkish War.

In 1902 the ship returned to Kronstadt for repairs, but very little was achieved until the early losses of the Russo-Japanese War caused the formation of the Second Pacific Squadron to relieve the Russian forces blockaded in Port Arthur.

She survived the daytime artillery duel with Admiral Heihachirō Tōgō's ships, but was badly damaged and taking on water.

The next morning the ship was unable to maintain speed because of flooding, and her crew surrendered to Japanese armed merchant cruisers.

The remaining two ships participated in the Battle of the Yellow Sea in August 1904 and were sunk or scuttled during the final stages of the Siege of Port Arthur.

She was seized by the British in early 1918 when they intervened in the Russian Civil War, abandoned by them when they withdrew and scrapped by the Soviets in 1924.

She was conceived as a small, inexpensive coastal defence ship, but the Navy abandoned the concept in favor of a compact, seagoing battleship with a displacement of 8,880 long tons (9,022 t).

Peresvet was sold back to the Russians during World War I and sank after hitting German mines in the Mediterranean in early 1917 while Pobeda, renamed Suwo, participated in the Battle of Tsingtao in late 1914.

Kniaz Potemkin Tavricheskiy («Князь Потёмкин-Таврический», 1900 BSF) – Renamed Panteleimon («Пантелеймон») 1905, renamed Potemkin-Tavricheskiy («Потёмкин-Таврический) 1917, Borets za Svobodu («Борец за Свободу») 1917, destroyed by British troops at Sevastopol 1919 {-} Retvizan (Ретвизан) was a pre-dreadnought battleship built before the Russo-Japanese War for the Imperial Russian Navy in the United States.

Lastly, what may be the most distinctive item of interest for the future, is the fact that the ships were constructed with tumblehome hulls, seemingly wider at the bottom then narrower towards the top.

As a lesson from Tsushima, tumblehome construction was discarded in warship design, as they were regarded as unstable under combat conditions.

They forced the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben to disengage during the Battle of Cape Sarych shortly after Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire in late 1914.

Both ships covered several bombardments of the Bosporus fortifications in early 1915, including one where they were attacked by Goeben, but they managed to drive her off.

Later, Evstafi and Ioann Zlatoust were relegated to secondary roles after the first dreadnought entered service in late 1915, and were subsequently put into reserve in 1918 in Sevastopol.

They were conceived by the Naval Technical Committee in 1903 as an incremental development of the Borodino-class battleships with increased displacement and heavier secondary armament.

In the first year of World War I, Andrei Pervozvanny and Imperator Pavel I comprised the battle core of the Baltic Fleet.

The battleships survived the Ice Cruise of 1918, and Andrei Pervozvanny later ruthlessly gunned down the Krasnaya Gorka fort mutiny of 1919.

Their role was to defend the mouth of the Gulf of Finland against the Germans, who never tried to enter, so the ships spent their time training and providing cover for minelaying operations.

Their crews participated in the general mutiny of the Baltic Fleet after the February Revolution in 1917, and joined the Bolsheviks the following year.

Petropavlovsk was retained in commission to defend Kronstadt and Leningrad against the British forces supporting the White Russians although she also helped to suppress a mutiny by the garrison of Fort Krasnaya Gorka in 1919.

Parizhskaya Kommuna, the former Sevastopol, was modified in 1928 to improve her sea-keeping abilities so that she could be transferred to the Black Sea Fleet which had nothing heavier than a light cruiser available.

A number of proposals were made in the 1930s to rebuild Frunze, ex-Poltava, to match her sisters or even as a battlecruiser by removing one turret, but these came to naught and she was hulked preparatory to scrapping.

The two ships of the Baltic Fleet did not play a prominent role in the Winter War, but did have their anti-aircraft guns significantly increased before Operation Barbarossa in 1941.

Marat had her bow blown off and Oktyabrskaya Revolyutsiya was badly damaged by multiple bomb hits in September.

The former was sunk, but later raised and became a floating battery for the duration of the Siege of Leningrad while the latter spent over a year under repair, although this was lengthened by subsequent bomb hits while in the hands of the shipyard.

Both ships bombarded German and Finnish troops so long as they remained within reach, but Oktyabrskaya Revolyutsiya did not venture away from Kronstadt for the duration of the war.

There were several plans (Project 27) to reconstruct Petropavlovsk using the bow of Frunze, but they were not accepted and were formally cancelled on 29 June 1948.

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.

Returned to Britain in poor condition in 1949 when the USSR received the Italian battleship Giulio Cesare and sold for scrap.