All too often, Western writers blithely—and inaccurately—use the word “never” when describing Russia’s relationship to the sea. “Never under the Tsars,” we are told, “did the Russian Navy penetrate the Mediterranean.” This, of course, is not true.
In 1725, one of Peter’s captains, Ivan Koshelev, with a ship-of-the-line and two frigates, voyaged from Kronstadt to Cadiz, and had a glimpse of the blue Mediterranean. In 1769, the Baltic Fleet came in force to fight the Turks in the Aegean, and commenced a Mediterranean squadron which had its bicentennial in November 1969.
While some writers may be forgiven for overlooking something that happened two-and-a-half centuries ago, it is harder to excuse those modern naval observers who maintain that “The Tsarist Navy never entered the Persian Gulf.”
In 1901, the Russian gunboat Giliak started a survey of the Persian Gulf. The tension between Britain and Russia over Persia was headed for war before being relaxed in the face of the danger of the Central Powers. Meanwhile, in 1901 and 1902, Russia laid down and built two gunboats especially designed for the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, too, the Giliak’s activities were covered by random visits of Russian cruisers outward bound for the holocaust of the Russo-Japanese War.
“Never” is a very long time. Yet, obviously, writers employ this emphatic adverb in order to focus our attention on what they consider to be an increasingly serious situation. It is serious—but not because it is new. It is grave because it is old. As will be shown, Russian use of the sea is ancient. What is visible today is a return to the sea and not a fresh adventure.
The Battle of Tsushima is probably to blame for our journalists’ use of “never.” From Peter until that disastrous day in the Sea of Japan, the Russian Navy was well reported in the West, except for gaps resulting from Tsarist secrecy. After the Russian Fleet’s annihilation by Admiral Togo, what remained of the Tsarist Navy was patronizingly dismissed as trivial. Nicholas II delayed rebuilding until details of a program could be perfected, with the result that Russia had minor naval strength for World War I.
Any nation with land frontiers must give first attention to an army. A significant navy is a reflection of an affluent economy. The ravaged Soviet Union had to put first things first, and so had trifling capital ship resources to fight Hitler’s war. Today’s noteworthy naval and maritime growth, then, may be taken as a sign of strong economic health.
From Tsushima into the 1950s, except for the excitement of World War II, Western publishers were very rarely persuaded to print anything about the Russian Navy. Today’s journalists, whose “backgrounding” technique consists principally of checking library’ card catalogs and periodical indices, frequently discover they have entered a desert with very few oases. If the researcher can read Russian, however, he will discover a lush jungle of material.
The use of “never” can therefore be forgiven, but it should be corrected because the American voter has a right to the facts of the situation and the facts are that Russian seamen are not inept bumblers. We must recognize that our primary error has been to measure them against our yardstick. We must try to comprehend their yardstick. Russians believe that they have a respectable history at sea, and it behooves us to know what they teach their young.
Chuckles would probably fill a Russian classroom should a teacher read from a recent U. S. professional military’ magazine, “Historically a land-oriented nation, the U.S.S.R. today is building powerful naval forces and a merchant fleet.” The amusement would stem not from the main statement, which is true, but from the introductory clause, so characteristic of Western expertise. Precisely what is “a land-oriented nation”? Or, for that matter, what is a sea-minded nation?
Assume that the “orientation” means that a controlling class or a majority of citizens look to the land or to the sea for life. Since modern nations began towards the end of the Middle Ages, what great nations other than Great Britain and Japan can, by such a definition, be styled “sea-oriented”? And why those two? Because of their insularity.
Has the United States ever been sea-oriented? If your answer is yes, take as many steps as are necessary to get to a library and read the domestic history of the U. S. Navy—and of the merchant marine. On the other hand, the “land-oriented” United States most certainly has a long and worthy tradition of seagoing, chockablock with notable events. To a lesser but still significant degree, it is the same with Russia. As in the United States, seagoing tradition was developed by a minority of our citizenry, so it was in “land-oriented” Russia, although by a far smaller minority.
Tradition is important. The U. S. Navy would not be exactly what it is without “I have not yet begun to fight!” spoken by John Paul Jones. Nor would the Soviet Navy be exactly what it is without “When you are at sea, you are at home,” said by Admiral Stepan Osipovich Makarov.[1] Vital, too, is the stockpile of “know-how” amassed through generations. After 1917. Tsarist seamen and officers in the spirit of “My Russia! . . . Right or wrong, my Russia!” entered the Red Navy and made the continuum.
For nearly two centuries after 1720, the Tsarist Navy was third, sometimes second, and on occasion worried the British by challenging them for first place. Some of our modern writers echo the worried expressions of Britons of 1790, the late 1830s, the 1870s, and the 1890s. Starry-eyed altruism was not the sole reason that the British made the events of 1904-1905 possible for the surprising Japanese. Tsushima ended a century of British apprehension, and the scorn of Russian capabilities found in British contemporary reports was possibly a matter of over-compensation.
What with our writers being prone to use “for the first time” too freely, a superficial survey of Russian voyages of discovery seems to be in order. Obvious Arctic explorative efforts, with a few exceptions, will be omitted, in preference to showing that modem Russians will be hard-pressed to find a watery nook in the world where Tsarist Russia did not precede them. Possibly Hudson’s Bay would provide the Red flag a “first.”
With the North American continent only usefully discovered in 1492, we might be respectful when Russian historians assert that in the decades before the Mongol Invasion of 1237, Russian seamen knew about Spitsbergen and Bear Island. Before this is dismissed as another Russian boast, one should remember that the redoubtable Vikings entered Russia about 860.
Before the crucial Mongol Invasion, with its many-fold impacts upon Russian life, Byzantium was regularly visited by Russian trading vessels. These came not only by the natural route of the Black Sea but from Baltic Novgorod, too. The Mongols stifled the Black Sea trade, hostile Baltic neighbors suppressed Novgorodian vessels, and the maritime development of Rus was dead, thrown back upon river skills and vessels.
Ship development had been promising. Indeed, by 900, the Rus of Azov and the Crimea were furnishing ships and seamen to Byzantium. Had they been untouched by the Mongols, the different history of the Rus might have made a different world. Suppose their shipbuilding had progressed to the proficiency and scale whereby they could have crushed the Byzantine Navy, the prime barrier to their expansion into the eastern Mediterranean? Suppose that, in 1453, Constantinople had fallen to the Rus instead of to the Turks?
After discarding the Mongol yoke in 1480, the Rus were still cut off from the Black Sea, this time by fierce Tatars subject to fiercer Turks. Hostile neighbors strangled the Baltic. Under Ivan the Dread, Russia moved eastward, destroying the Tatar line at Kazan in 1552. Now, Cossacks seized the boat tradition of the early Slavs, which had been perfected by Viking tutelage. The Cossack boat was stout enough to weather storms and light enough to be portaged. With these and audacious men, Vasili Yermak in 1581 began the eastward surge from the Urals, and became the Daniel Boone of Russian lore.
Using boats and a wondrous web of rivers, Cossacks drove and probed until in 1639 Ivan Moskvitin glided to a halt at a rivermouth and looked at the Pacific. The place would be named Okhotsk.
What happened then? Moskvitin and his band boldly pushed their rivercraft 30 miles into a sea no Russian had seen before.
Thus began the Russian age of discovery, in which, for 160 years, exploration of the far Pacific actually overshadowed efforts in the Arctic, which was much more accessible. A table of recorded explorations shows the trend. The terminus of the span is 1799, when Alexander Baranov confidently started the Russian-American Company:
Russian Voyages of Discovery
| Arctic | North Pacific |
1639-1725 | 15 | 12 |
1726-1750 | 20 | 31 |
1751-1775 | 15 | 27 |
1776-1799 | 8 | 23 |
Total | 58 | 93 |
The foregoing activity demanded technical support. One of our larger misconceptions is a belief that Peter the Great innovated everything nautical. His contribution was more truly a vast increase in volume. In 1602, Tsar Boris Godunov started the shipyard at Archangel. By 1667, ship business had reached the point where a branch of government, the Ship Prikaz, was Established by Tsar Alexis. Peter put sea affairs into permanence with his 1701 Navigation School in Moscow, his 1715 Naval Academy in Petersburg, and his 1725 Naval Observatory. It was he, too, who sent Vitus Bering to Okhotsk and fame. In 1752, Peter’s daughter Elisabeth founded the Marine Hydrometeorological Institute at Kronstadt, inaugurating systematic observation of sea levels, commencing in the estuary of the North Dvina.
The embryo of the science of oceanography received life force from studies in the 1750s by Mikhail Lomonosov, the Benjamin Franklin of Russia. His name today has been bestowed upon Moscow University. Analyzing the massive data gathered by the Great Northern Expedition—to be described below—he endeavored to locate a northern sea route to reach the Indies. The route itself would have to await the coming of power, radio, and aviation; still, in 1763, Lomonosov did publish the first 360° chart of the Polar Sea. It had the errors to be expected from the state of the art of navigation, particularly in Arctic latitudes. As for longitudes, Harrison’s 1735 chronometer did not reach Russia until 1766[;][2] in offset, Russian seamen tirelessly compiled empiric sailing directions.
The Great Northern Expedition was a remarkable, coordinated survey of the Arctic coast. It was the more remarkable because it began in 1734, otherwise a period of naval neglect by Anna Ivanovna. Some details may convey a notion of the hardihood and daring exhibited by the survey party members. Five sectors were delimited from Archangel eastward. Lieutenant Stepan Muraviev had the first region to the Ob river. He and his men used a pair of kochi. These were open boats, 52½ feet long, 14 feet in beam, and 8 feet deep. The crew of Lieutenant Dmitri Ovtsyn covered the coast from the Ob to the Yenisei in a sloop that was 70 feet long. In 1735, Lieutenant Peter Lasinius in a 60-foot boat started the work from the Lena to the east, while Vasili Pronchishchev went to the west. Lasinius and Pronchishchev both succumbed to hardships. In 1738, Dmitri Laptev took the place of Lasinius. A year later, his cousin Khariton took up the work of Pronchishchev, thus fixing the name of Laptev upon a sea. The last sector of the coast, from the Yenisei to Cape Sterlegov, was initiated in 1738 by Fedor Minin. These explorations lasted from three to seven years. When winter came, often as not the 50 to 70-man crews simply camped where they were. As mentioned above, Lomonosov was the leading scientist who endeavored to collate the many reports.
Who found Bering Strait? Soviet historians credit Semen Dezhnev and a boat party with going from the Arctic southwards through the passage between Asia and America. If true, and there is small reason to doubt it, the discovery did not make a permanent impression. Dezhnev died in obscurity in Moscow in 1673. In any case, the conception of a strait dated back to Marco Polo, and, in time, the philosopher Leibnitz succeeded in persuading Peter to send out the expedition led by Bering. In 1728, Bering went through the strait and doubled back. Four years later, his findings were confirmed by Ivan Pedorov.
In the 19th century, when Russian maps and atlases began to be available, Britons somewhat naively complained because the Russians had “changed” so many British geographic names in the North Pacific. In most instances, the Russians had been first and had only themselves to blame for skepticism about their claims. Whenever possible, the Russians had kept their discoveries secret.[3] Their records do indicate that through the 18th century, the forbidding North Pacific had bustled with Russian craft. There was little if any activity for three score years after Ivan Moskvitin discovered the Sea of Okhotsk in 1639. Cossacks found northern China far more exciting until halted on their side of the Amur by the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689.
In 1697, the extreme North Pacific again knew Cossacks. Curiously, the new and permanent interest did not begin from Okhotsk, but southward from the Arctic post of Nizhne-Kolymsk near the mouth of the Kolyma river. The great figure was Vladimir Atlasov. Natives told him of the Kamchatka peninsula and finally, with a band of 60 Cossacks, he went to see for himself. Local tribesmen fought his progress but he prevailed, founding Verkhnie-Kamchatsk and then Nizhne-Kamchatsk along the eastern coast. He heard of the Kuriles, but his captain Mikhail Nasedkin first found the Komandorskis in 1702. Four years later, Nasedkin was in the Kuriles.
Meanwhile, in the European part of Russia, Peter the Great had consolidated his rule. Peter’s attention was drawn eastward by the 1700 report of silver at Nerchinsk, and then he heard of Atlasov, who was making Kamchatka into a Russian province. Peter began to furnish means and funds. However, the conquest of Kamchatka became steadily more difficult, both from the mounting hostility of the natives and because of the nature of the broken terrain.
The rallying point became Fort Bolcherietsk, built in 1705 on the western side. From there, in 1711-1712, the two northernmost Kuriles were temporarily settled, while Semen Anabara ranged south into the Sea of Okhotsk to find the Shandarski islands. Off the east coast of Kamchatka, Vaginy found the Blizhnie islands As activity increased, so did the agony of supply. Thus, the port of Okhotsk came into being.
In 1716, the first vessel built at Okhotsk sailed to support Kamchatka, and trained personnel from Peter’s new Navy began taking over the seaman’s task from the Cossacks. A systematic survey of the Kamchatkan coast commenced, which became the task of Bering. Some appreciation of the difficulties involved in sup porting the Pacific venture overland from European Russia may be seen in the commitment of nearly 700 horses to draw the wagons loaded with the hardware for Bering to build two small 80-foot packetboats.
Before his death, Peter had dreamed of a northern sea route into the Pacific, with the goal of trade. From Okhotsk, the dream took substance when Martin Spanberg, a Dane, in 1738, in the 70-foot sloop Nadezhda (Hope) touched Japanese Hokkaido. By 1740, the pace of continuing activity demanded the opening of Petropavlovsk as a base on the eastern side of Kamchatka. The next year, Bering and Aleksei Chirikov made landings in North America.
Now began the period of settlement. The natives fought, especially the Aleuts on Unalaska and Indians on the American mainland, but they were overborne and harnessed to gather furs.
Shortly after her reign started in 1762, benevolent Catherine the Great used Kamchatka as a wall-less prison for political malefactors. One of these, Polish Count Beniovski, in 1771 seized a vessel and successfully escaped to China. By the time he reached Paris, Russian secrets about the North Pacific were breached. It was not mischance in 1787 that brought the famous French explorer Lapérouse to Kamchatka.
By 1792, Adam Laxman succeeded in opening very limited trade with Japan. He returned to Nagasaki the crew of a Japanese vessel wrecked in the Aleutians and was rewarded by permission to send an annual ship. By 1794, Russian need for ships had extended to the American shore, where the Feniks (Phoenix) was built at Sitka. In 1799, the North Pacific was a Russian lake, and Alexander Baranov confidently started the Russian-American Company. Thereafter, voyages were routine.
Scurvy was the plague besetting the Russian efforts. While the affliction was not completely understood, the therapeutic value of fresh vegetables and fruits was known. The fur trade as organized by Baranov was so lucrative that Alexander I, in the midst of his troubles with Napoleon, decided to give substantial aid to a good taxpayer. The Baltic Fleet was ordered to explore the Pacific to find a dependable source of fresh food. So, in the wake of the ill-starred HMS Bounty, the Russian Navy began voyages of circumnavigation from Kronstadt. In the interim, the Russian-American Company made exploratory efforts on their own behalf.
The crews of the 430-ton Nadezhda of Ivan Krusenstern and the 370-ton Neva of Yuri Lisianski were the first to cross the Equator. Thereafter, the Russians made shellbacks almost every year. To 1842, no fewer than 28 vessels made the circuit from the Baltic to the North Pacific. A few were owned by Baranov’s Company. Nine went out via Cape Horn and returned via the Cape of Good Hope. Fifteen reversed the passage, taking Good Hope out and the Horn back. Four hardy lieutenants on loan to the Company used Cape Horn going and coming, the largest ship being the 525-ton Kutusov and the smallest, the 335-ton Suvorov.
Of curiosity interest for our times was the 1822-1824 voyage of the 900-ton sloop-of-war Apollon. Her commander was one Stepan Petrovich Khrushchev.
The most important exploration was the 1819-1821 cruise by Fabian von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev in the sloops-of-war Vostok and Mirny. They enlarged Cook’s discovery of the Antarctic Ocean by a complete rounding of the ice mass. They actually sighted the continent but did not recognize it for what it was. The voyage, of course, buttresses the claim of the Soviet Union to its portion of Antarctica.
Lazarev, for his share in this and three later voyages, is the storied hero among the score or so captains who put Russian names upon hundreds of Pacific islands. Other favorites are, of course, Krusenstern and Lisianski for being first; Vasili Golovnin for an interesting account of his captivity in Japan; and Fedor Litke for his discovery of a dozen of the Carolines. Otto Kotsebue made three voyages in the Rurik and touched Easter Island. Perhaps the most widely known voyage, however, came in 1852-1853, a decade after the rest.
This was the Pacific cruise of the frigate Pallada carrying the flag of Vice Admiral Efim Putiatin. The admiral’s secretary, who wrote a superb book about the voyage, was Ivan Goncharov. His Cruise of the Pallada is still in print in the “land-oriented” Soviet Union.
Secrecy is again to blame for the general ignorance of the West about these voyages. Censorship delayed publication of accounts for as long as 20 years, by which time Western interest or curiosity had usually abated. The Hakluyt Society, however, has translated and circulated the papers of von Bellingshausen.
Russian chroniclers fail to stress a common factor other than exploration, in the careers of Krusenstern, Lisianski, Golovnin, and Litke. In the period 1792-1815, 40 young Russian officers were trained in Britain’s Royal Navy, and the four future explorers were among the group who learned their trade in the world's finest navy. All four became professionally influential, especially Krusenstern. After 1827, he headed the Naval Academy for 14 years, helping to shape the careers of more than a thousand officers. Lisianski became a recognized authority in ethnography. Golovnin found his forte in tactics, devising a system which remained in force for 25 years. The youngest of the group, Litke. was President of the notable Academy of Sciences for 18 years.
With such men, Russia took the forefront in oceanography. The basic tool, of course, is the ship. Steamers are more versatile than sailing craft, and in 1815, Alexander I had the steamer Elizabeth built at St. Petersburg. Transition at the expense of extant stockpile is always painful and the Russian Navy had a tremendous investment in sail. Also, early steam was notoriously inefficient, so Russia conservatively continued to construct sail with a very small number of steamers, trusting the reliable rather than the new. From 1801 to 1842, for example, the great Archangel shipyard turned out 41 ships-of-the-line, 25 frigates, and 18 lesser men-of-war, as well as 84 merchantmen. In the total of 169 vessels, only three were steamers, the first being the 60-h.p. Legkii in 1825. Russian scientists, then, could not count on the availability of a steamer until after 1857, when the humiliations of the Crimean War induced St. Petersburg to stop building sail.
On the theoretical side, the Admiralty was progressive. In 1827, both a Hydrographic Department and a Pilots’ School were established. Thereafter, oceanography progressed into increasingly better organization and record-keeping, field, and laboratory techniques. In 1834, the first accurate, chemical analysis of sea water was perfected. Qualified scientists remained in very short supply, however, and the coastal data-gathering stations were handicapped. Even so, by 1835, they were reporting from Okhotsk, Murmansk, Kamchatka, Sitka, and the future site of Sovetskaya Gavan, the great port on the Gulf of Tatary.
In 1866, Lieutenant K. S. Staritski commenced five leisurely years of deep-water observations in the northern section of the Sea of Japan. To Russian schoolchildren, the most fascinating account of similar cruises was that of the Vitiaz, which left Kronstadt in 1870. An ethnographer, Nikolai Miklukho-Maklai, was on board for passage to New Guinea, where he voluntarily became a Robinson Crusoe of sorts.
As in so much else connected with the Russian Navy, an outstanding contributor to oceanography and exploration was Stepan Osipovich Makarov. He would have graced any navy. A happy combination of practice and theory, he was also a great leader. In 1867, when he was a cadet of 19, his first article was published in Morskoi Sbornik. It was the first of some 90 professional works and dealt with a suggested method for determining magnetic deviation at sea. Fertile in applying science, at the age of 22, he invented the collision mat. He submitted his thoughts on general damage control to the Admiralty and at 23 was rewarded by a grant of 200 rubles and promotion to lieutenant.
Only 29 in 1877, he received world renown by his conception and use of a torpedoboat carrier. Against the vast superiority of the Turkish Navy, he was credited with gaining moral ascendancy through his night raids on Turkish anchorages. In 1881, on the humdrum assignment of commanding the station ship Taman at Constantinople, he conducted surveys that resulted in establishing the facts about the “Interchange of Water between the Black and Mediterranean Seas.”
Trained in the Far East at the tiny Naval School of Nikolaevsk-on-the-Amur, Makarov was Pacific-minded. As he acquired seniority and influence, Makarov turned his brilliant mind to wresting from the Arctic a passageway to the Bering Strait. He clearly foresaw the conflict with Japan and strove to avoid the necessity of a Suez, much less a Capetown, transit. Ice had turned back all prior attempts. Makarov proposed to attack the ice. Designing a revolutionary craft of 8,000 tons, he sold the project by stressing her use in the Baltic to break open lanes for commerical [sic] vessels. This heavy, ocean-going icebreaker was built by Armstrong and Whitworth at Newcastle, and appropriately named Yermak for the trailblazer to the East.
Eyes were rubbed in Kronstadt harbor in mid-March, 1899, when Makarov steamed through the ice. The Yermak promptly paid for herself by freeing some four-score steamers in Russian ports. Such was not Makarov’s real intent, however, and in June, he went off to see the Arctic again, this time equipped as he wished.
Makarov made three efforts before being defeated. Ironically, he was not defeated by nature. Indeed, he was succeeding to a modest extent, and his success alarmed the financiers of the Trans-Siberian railroad who shortsightedly perceived a threat to their project. So, Makarov was told to attend to his duties as commandant of Kronstadt. Even there, his Yermak restrained to her proper task, he continued to work on the Arctic problem. He had huge masses of data to analyze from the work of predecessors. Indeed, there are indications that Russian bureaucracy had assiduously collected data far past their powers of digestion. If he could not gain his goal by one means, Makarov was ready to try another. In 1902, he was a leading spirit in the formation of an International Council for Oceanic Studies.
That international cooperation signalized the last years of the Tsarist regime. Someday, it may come to pass that the Soviet obsession with secrecy will dwindle in the expansiveness of the seas to which Russians are returning.
Meanwhile, history offers some comfort.
First, slim consolation though it may be, the present growth and deployments of the Soviet Navy exhibit a trend towards the conventional usage in which navies of the Free World have enormous experience. Surely this trend is preferable to the computerized variables of nuclear wargaming.
Second, the West should glance at Britain’s anxious century, 1790-1905, of living with the seemingly aggressive Russian Navy. While politicians like Pitt and Palmerston and Disraeli flamed the air with their alarms, some crustacean British admirals—especially after the frustations [sic] of the Crimean War—rather liked to see the Russians at large upon the sea.
Admirals from Nelson to Fisher tended very calmly to see the Tsar’s ships on the blue water as hostages making for sensible conduct by the Tsar.
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Professor Daly has taught history at the U. S. Naval Academy since 1 July 1946. He was graduated from Loyola University of Chicago in 1939 and received a Ph.D. in History from that University in 1949. A captain in the U. S. Coast Guard Reserve, his affiliation with that organization began in 1941. An instructor in general studies of the U. S. Coast Guard Academy until 1943, he served in the USS Poughkeepsie (PF-26) later in World War II. His principal professional interest since 1957 has been teaching an elective course in Russian Military and Naval History, from which a manuscript tentatively entitled “A Survey of Russian Wars” is developing. He is the author of Broadsides (1940); Soldier of the Sea (1942); and Guns of Yorktown (1953). He contributed to The Soviet Navy (1958); and he edited Aboard the Monitor (1964).
[1] See D W. Mitchell, “Admiral Makarov: Attack! Attack! Attack!” Naval Institute Proceedings, July 1965, pp. 57-67.
[2] See also D. Macintyre, “John Longitude Harrison,” U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 1964, pp. 74-81.
[3] See also C. P. Lemieux, “In Defense of the Russian Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 1964, pp. 143-145.