The Russian Navy owes its 300-year longevity to a youthful visionary who called himself admiral, general, and tsar.
Three centuries ago. Tsar Peter I (1672-1725) founded the Russian Navy. After being defeated in a land campaign against the Turks at Azov in 1695, the 23-year-old attempted to capture the fortress town—15 miles from the sea of the same name—the following year. The Azov Sea, he hoped, could give Russia access to the Black and Mediterranean seas.
The earlier defeat had not discouraged young Peter; his biographer. Robert K. Massie, wrote “Making no excuses, acknowledging failure, Peter threw himself into preparations for a second attempt [against Azov], He had been thwarted by three mistakes: divided command, a lack of skilled engineers to construct efficient siege works and an absence of control of the sea at the river mouth to seal off the fortress from outside help.”1
A galley purchased in Holland and delivered to the port of Archangel in the Arctic was cut into sections and brought to Moscow. There, she was to serve as a model for Russian ship- builders.: Construction sites for this new fleet were at Voronezh on the Don River, south of Moscow, and at Lake Pereslavl (Plescheyevo), on the upper reaches of the Volga River. Ships at the latter site were built in sections and dragged on sledges along snow-covered roads for final assembly at Voronezh. Almost 28,000 men worked at Voronezh in this herculean effort to build the first Russian fleet. They built 29 armed galleys and 1,300 river barges. The galleys were “respectable sea-going men of war fit to defeat Turkish warships on the estuary of the Don [River] or even on the open waters of the Sea of Azov.”3
Supported by this fleet, Peter’s second attempt against the fortress at Azov was successful. With this foothold on the southern seas, on 20 October 1696 Peter signed a decree addressing the construction of seagoing ships and ordered an even larger fleet to be built at Voronezh, with Western shipwrights providing technical guidance. The first man-of-war produced under this decree was the Oryol (Eagle).
To man his new fleet, Peter sent 50 sons of the noblest families to England, Holland, and Venice, where they studied seamanship, navigation, and shipbuilding. None was to return to Russia without a certificate signed by a foreign master, attesting to the student’s proficiency.
Subsequently, Peter himself led an “embassy” of more than 250 people to Western Europe, where they studied Western methods and enlisted officers, sailors, engineers, and shipwrights. Peter himself attempted to travel with the group, incognito, as “Peter Mikhailov.” (Anyone in the embassy revealing that he was the tsar or that the tsar was present in the group at all was to be punished by death. But many who met the six-foot-seven- inch Peter Mikhailov immediately knew his real identity.)
Peter’s 18-month European tour included the North German state of Brandenburg, Holland (which had the world’s largest merchant fleet at the time), England, and Austria. Beyond informal meetings with foreign leaders, he visited docks, shipyards, factories, and even a watchmaker and coffin maker. His single visit to a London theater turned disastrous, when he was recognized by the audience. Peter himself, ostensibly incognito, actually worked as a laborer in shipyards during the tour.
He next turned his efforts to gaining a foothold on the Baltic Sea. Building another fleet, Peter defeated the Swedes on land and at sea in 1703. He then founded a new capital city— St. Petersburg—in the marshes of the Neva River, where it entered the Gulf of Finland. There he built a “modem” city, including, in 1705, the Admiralty Yard, which served as the country’s principal shipyard for almost 100 years. (Its buildings survive today as a naval school.)
The first in a long line of Russian ships-of-the-line was the Poltava, launched at the Admiralty Yard in 1712. Russian shipyards in the region also built smaller sailing warships and numerous galleys, which proved useful in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Finland and could be operated by soldiers and sailors with minimal skills and training. But the galleys had limited at- sea endurance, requiring Peter to establish naval bases along the Gulf of Finland and the eastern Baltic, some of which are now the key military and civilian ports of the region.
On 16 November 1705, Peter established a naval infantry regiment for his newly created Baltic Fleet. With 45 officers and 1,320 soldiers, this was the first unit of the Russian-Soviet Naval Infantry (Morskaya Pekhota) or marines. Initially serving on board warships, these marines as well as large numbers of soldiers participated repeatedly in landings beginning in 1707 along the coasts of Finland and Sweden, and on offshore islands in the Baltic during the latter stages of Peter’s lengthy conflict with Sweden. These operations were the precursors of most “modem” Western amphibious landings.
Peter became involved in every aspect of his Navy’s development. In 1699 he introduced admiral ranks in the Russian Navy—rear (kontr), vice (vitse), and full admiral. Although Peter held both military and naval ranks, he was only a captain in the Russian Navy until his 1709 victory over the Swedish Army at Poltava. Only after that triumph—the first by Russian forces against a major European army—did he take the rank of rear admiral in the Navy and promote himself from colonel to lieutenant general in the Army. The tsar did not assume the rank of full admiral until after his ultimate victory over Sweden in 1721.4
In 1712 Peter decreed that all sons of landowners enter national service. The youngest went to the German city of Revel to study seamanship, the middle group to Holland for naval training, and the eldest marched directly into the army to serve as private soldiers for a period before being promoted on the basis of merit. In 1715 the tsar moved the School of Mathematics and Navigation from Moscow to St. Petersburg and filled its classrooms with sons from almost all of the noble families in Russia between ages 10 and 18. The school soon became known as the Naval Academy.
Peter established the grades of captain 1st, 2nd, and 3rd rank (ranga) in 1713. Officers held rank corresponding to the rank of the ship they commanded (rang korablya). Thus, a captain 2nd rank normally commanded a second rank ship.
“The Russian navy was possibly the proudest of Peter’s creations, but it was in every respect also the most perishable,” wrote British military historian Christopher Duffy.5 Still, many of the traditions, ranks, and even institutions established by Peter have survived through the tsarist and the communist eras and are found in today’s Russian Navy.
1 Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), p. 142.
2 At the time Archangel was Russia’s only ocean port.
3 Massey, op. cit.
4 Also on September 1721, the Russian Senate offered Peter the titles of “the Great” and “Emperor;” he was known subsequently as Peter the Great.
5 Christopher Duffy, Russia’s Military Way to the West (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 36.
Mr. Polmar is a prolific author, military commentator, defense consultant, and columnist for Proceedings.