In July 1916 the submarine entered the Gulf of Varna to carry out reconnaissance on the Bulgarian naval base there, and in October, some of its crewmen boarded and captured a Turkish transport ship before bringing it back with them to Sevastopol.

Tyulen was among Wrangel's fleet of ships that evacuated from Crimea in late 1920 during the Russian Civil War, and ended up in French Tunisia, where the submarine was eventually sold for scrap in 1930.

The 1911 naval program approved by the State Duma included the order of six submarines for the Black Sea Fleet, which ended up being three Morzh-class boats and three Narval-class.

[7][8] The Morzh-class submarines were well-armed for the time, and Tyulen differed from the others by having two deck guns instead of one, along with four internal torpedo tubes and eight Dzhevetskiy torpedo-launching collars.

An additional problem was that twin 1,140-horsepower (850 kW) diesel engines to power all three Morzh-class boats had been ordered from Germany, but were not delivered by the time World War I broke out.

[3][9] The construction of all three Morzh-class boats began on 25 June 1911,[10] and took place at the Nikolayev department of the Baltic Yard, which was specifically founded to build the Morzh class.

[4] The Black Sea Fleet spent the first months of the war in 1914 on the defensive, but in early 1915 this changed when the Stavka ordered its commander to attack the Bosporus and Constantinople in support of the French and the British Gallipoli campaign.

[4] The Russian naval campaign in 1915 did not have any significant impact on the fighting in Gallipoli, but attacks on coal transports did undermine the Ottoman Empire's war effort, causing the German commanding admiral in the region, Wilhelm Souchon, to limit the actions of his ships to save fuel.

[15] The campaign against merchant shipping continued, and the submarine's commander, Kititsyn, increasingly began attacking while on the surface using artillery guns and ramming to destroy Turkish schooners.

On a mission off the Bulgarian coast in May 1916, Tyulen destroyed four Turkish schooners escorting a coal ship using artillery, then captured and towed the transport to Sevastopol.

[4] Its crew and captain were awarded decorations for the mission, and the information they gathered on the Varna naval base was used by the Black Sea Fleet to launch an air raid on it in late August 1916, using planes from three seaplane tenders, while the battleship Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaya and seven destroyers provided security.

The captured Turkish transport ship was brought back by the submarine to Sevastopol, and the entire crew of Tyulen were awarded the Cross of St. George for the achievement.

[20] Under the Russian Provisional Government, the Black Sea Fleet continued to mount attacks along the Turkish coast for months after the February Revolution, and Tyulen destroyed several more ships that year.

[2][4] One estimate put the tonnage sunk by Tyulen at 8,973 gross register tons (GRT), which was the second most in the Russian Navy during the war, only behind Captain 1st rank Ivan Messer and his boat in the Baltic Sea,[4] the submarine Volk.