The 2,100-long-ton (2,100 t) Charodeika-class monitor met all of the requirements except that their armament was not powerful enough, so General-Admiral Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich selected Popov's circular design in late December 1869.

A model was built with a circular hull and performed well during tests in the Baltic Sea at St. Petersburg in April 1870; when Tsar Alexander II received reports of the trials, he nicknamed the ship a "popovka", after the designer.

On 24 October, the Tsar approved his design for a ship 96 feet (29.3 m) in diameter, armed with two 11-inch guns, and protected by 12 inches (305 mm) of armour.

Her bluff hull form meant that she lost speed in heavy weather and, in some conditions, the ship could pitch enough to place her propellers out of the water.

During a Force 7 storm, Vitse-admiral Popov's captain wrote that: "the vessel took on a lot of water through the hatches in front of the ventilators...

Vitse-admiral Popov's propulsion machinery proved problematic throughout her life as a result of defective workmanship and poor-quality materials.

Her blunt hull form was not conducive to efficient steaming and she proved to be a prodigious consumer of coal as her capacity of 250 long tons (250 t) only gave her range of 540 nautical miles (1,000 km; 620 mi) at full speed.

[8] Rear Admiral N. M. Chikhachev, commander of Odessa's naval defences during the Russo-Turkish War, reported that the guns could be fired at full power only "in case of extreme necessity".

Gunnery trials conducted in November showed that the system worked smoothly, although reloading time was around 14 minutes per gun.

[10] Unlike the earlier popovka, Novgorod, Vitse-admiral Popov (that has originally name Kyiv) was built at the Nikolaev Admiralty Shipyard.

Popov had already received approval to change the horizontal engines to vertical ones in March 1872 and decided to improve the ship based on the trials of Novgorod during the delay.

[11] During the Russo-Turkish War, she was assigned to the defense of Odessa and her armament was reinforced by a pair of four-pounder guns mounted on the bridge wings.

After the war the ship received armoured covers for her engine room skylight and the central barbette hatch to protect against plunging fire.

[12] She was reclassified as a coast-defence ironclad on 13 February 1892 by which time her armament had been augmented by two 37-millimetre (1.5 in) quick-firing Hotchkiss five-barreled revolving cannon.

In his book, The World's Worst Warships, naval historian Antony Preston characterised the popovkas like this: But in other respects, they were a dismal failure.

[14] The design of these ships was very controversial while they were being built in the 1870s, with many articles being published in the newspapers of the day by supporters and detractors, and later picked up by historians.

One such account, published in 1875, claimed that Novgorod made an uncontrollable turn while on the Dniepr,[15] while Reed, describing a time when the ship's engines on one side were reversed during a cruise in Sevastopol Bay, wrote: "The circular form is so extremely favourable to this kind of handiness that the Novgorod can easily be revolved on her centre at a speed which quickly makes one giddy.

"[16] It would seem probable that the two reports quoted above were combined into the story as given by Fred T. Jane: "On a trial cruise, they (Novgorod and Vitse-admiral Popov) went up the Dniepr very nicely for some distance, till they turned to retire.