The Andrei Pervozvanny class were a pair of pre-dreadnought battleships built in the first decade of the twentieth century for the Baltic Fleet of the Imperial Russian Navy. They were conceived by the Naval Technical Committee in 1903 as an incremental development of the s with increased displacement and heavier secondary armament. The disastrous experiences of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 and the unrest resulting from the 1905 Russian Revolution led to countless redesigns, change orders and delays in construction. Despite the designers' repeated attempts to modernize the ships while under construction, they were obsolete in concept from the beginning, and even more so when they entered service in 1911.
In the first year of World War I, Andrei Pervozvanny and Imperator Pavel I formed the core of the Baltic Fleet. For most of the war they remained moored in the safety of Sveaborg and Helsingfors.Suomenlinna (former Sveaborg) is now part of the city of Helsinki (former Helsingfors). Sveaborg and Helsingfors were two separate bases of the Imperial Russian Navy. Idle, demoralized ratings subscribed to Bolshevik ideology and on took control of the ships in a violent mutiny, killing many of their officers in the process. The battleships participated in the Ice Cruise of 1918, and Andrei Pervozvanny later helped to put down the Krasnaya Gorka fort mutiny of 1919. After the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921, the Bolshevik government lost interest in maintaining the battleships, and they were scrapped beginning in November–December 1923.
Design
The planned completion of the five s in 1904 would leave Russian shipbuilders with little work, so the Naval Technical Committee (NTC) organized a conference in late 1902 on the new 20-year shipbuilding program, which included money for four battleships in 1903 and 1904, a pair for the Black Sea Fleet () and another pair for the Baltic Fleet. Based on the recommendations of the participants, the NTC chose a much larger and heavily armoured version of the Borodinos for the Baltic ships, with their secondary armament upgraded to quick-firing guns rather than the guns of the older ships. The initial estimate of the design's displacement became an informal upper limit which constrained the design of the ships.Melnikov 2003, pp. 2–11.
At the beginning of 1903, the Russian Naval General Staff considered sketch designs by the designer of the Borodino class, Dmitry Skvortsov, and the NTC and selected the former's proposal. It also issued more detailed requirements for the new ships. They were to be fitted with 12- and 8-inch guns, each in twin-gun turrets, and equipped with twenty guns for defence against torpedo boats. Their protection was to consist of a waterline belt with an upper strake of armour or a uniform belt 8 inches thick. The speed of the battleships was to be no less than and they were to have a maximum draught of to allow passage through the Suez Canal. Concerned about stability, the staff reduced the superstructure by one deck. Skvortsov presented his drawings and calculations in June.McLaughlin, p. 181.
Skortsov warned about the unacceptable drag of the hull form that he was forced to use and Alexey Krylov, then chief of the Navy's ship model basin agreed, but nothing was done to improve its efficiency. Krylov's planned departure for the Far East forced the NTC to hasten official approval of the draft design. Their presentation on ended in an embarrassment: the NTC intended to award the contract for one of two new ships to Baltic Works, but did not even inform its master builder Sergey Ratnik about the project's existence. Ratnik, who had built two of the Borodino-class ships, believed that the new design was inferior to its predecessors. It had no displacement reserve compared to the allowed for the Borodino class and the British standard of at least 4% of displacement. The NTC overruled his objections and approved the design for construction. At the end of July, Ratnik appealed to the NTC again, arguing that the mechanisms and systems overlooked by the designers would add to the ship's weight. The NTC dismissed his complaint and proceeded with the flawed design. In line with Russian practice of the period, it was a collective work signed off by a ring of designers and bureaucrats. No one dared to take the lead and assume full responsibility. In August the NTC finalized the design with only marginal improvements. On the Ministry of the Navy awarded construction contracts to the Galernyi Island Shipyard (Andrei Pervozvanny) and the Baltic Works (Imperator Pavel I) in Saint Petersburg.Melnikov, pp. 10–18.
Construction Actual work on Andrei Pervozvanny commenced on and construction began on Imperator Pavel I on . Coal-firing boilers and steam engines were ordered from the Franco-Russian Works. In an inexplicable twist of the NTC bureaucracy, engines for the two sister ships were ordered to different specifications.Melnikov 2003, pp. 19, 51. In line with Russian tradition Andrei Pervozvanny was formally laid down in May 1905, after more than a year of construction work. The ceremony coincided with the beginning of a six-month hiatus (May–October 1905) caused by the 1905 Russian Revolution. Baltic Works cancelled the laying-down ceremony of Imperator Pavel I altogether: officially, Pavel was laid down and launched on the same date, .Melnikov 2005, pp. 6–9; Melnikov 2003, pp. 21–23.
Construction proceeded at a slow pace, frequently interrupted by redesign proposals, change orders, rework and inevitable delays. After the completion of Andrei Pervozvanny its builders identified seventeen distinct stages of its design.Melnikov 2003, pp. 19–21. The sinking of the battleship in April 1904, which was blamed on a detonation of its stored naval mines or the forward 12-inch magazine, or both, compelled the NTC to reconsider the use of mines. Russian battleships carried their own stock of naval mines to protect themselves at anchorage, even when accompanied by minelayers and destroyers. The NTC banned mines from battleships on . In December 1904 the NTC also agreed to strip the new battleships of their stern torpedo tubes, but kept the bow and broadside tubes. In mid-1905 the torpedo armament was reduced to only two broadside tubes.McLaughlin, p. 182; Melnikov 2003, pp. 20–21.
The NTC flooded Skvortsov in 1905 with a chain of conflicting and poorly formulated change orders influenced by war-time experience. The war demonstrated the uselessness of keeping small-calibre guns on capital ships; in the NTC replaced the guns with more 75 mm guns in an upper-deck casemate. The 75 mm guns were replaced with guns on , a few days after the Battle of Tsushima. More thorough analysis of the battle revealed that earlier Russian ships relied too much on unarmoured plating to preserve stability and that splinters from shells that penetrated the unarmoured sides could damage or disable important equipment like ammunition hoists and boiler exhausts. The additional armour required to cover the entire side of the design boosted its displacement to as of late 1905. In May 1906, the NTC decided to save weight by replacing the central 8-inch turret with three 8-inch guns in casemates. It also eliminated openings in the sides of the hull such as gun embrasures and portholes, believing that they were a flooding danger if damaged or if the ship had a list. This caused major problems with ventilation and adversely affecting their habitability, while the 120-millimetre guns had to be moved to positions above the central casemate.McLaughlin, pp. 182–183; Melnikov 2003, pp. 20–24.
Assessment of the damage incurred in the Battle of the Yellow Sea led the NTC to another incorrect conclusion. The NTC tacticians noted that a single hit on the mast of Tsesarevich had nearly knocked it down; a fallen mast would have probably disabled its secondary-gun turrets. Lattice masts, introduced with the American s, seemed to be a robust solution and the Andrei Pervozvanny-class ships became the only Russian battleships fitted with them. They proved to be unstable and prone to vibration in service and the signal positions in them were regularly enveloped by funnel gases. Despite those drawbacks, the captain of Andrei Pervozvanny fiercely defended them and objected to all alternatives proposed by the NTC. On the day when Austria-Hungary declared war against Russia, the captain of Imperator Pavel I, who held an opposite opinion, volunteered to replace the masts in three days. Fleet commander Admiral Nikolai von Essen concurred, and by the middle of August 1914, the old lattice masts were largely gone. Both ships retained the lower baskets of their masts, cut at different heights.Melnikov 2003, pp. 24, 26, 31, 41, 57, 58.
Description The Andrei Pervozvanny-class ships were long at the waterline and long overall. They had a beam of and a draught of at deep load. The ships displaced at normal load and at deep load. Their hull was subdivided by 17 transverse watertight bulkheads and the engine rooms were divided by a centreline longitudinal bulkhead. They had a double bottom and a metacentric height of . The ships' crew consisted of 31 officers and 924 crewmen.McLaughlin, pp. 180–181.
The ships had two 4-cylinder vertical triple-expansion steam engines, each driving a propeller, using steam provided by twenty-five Belleville boilers at a working pressure of . The engines had a total designed output of . During the ships' sea trials, they produced and gave the sisters a top speed of . The ships carried a maximum load of of coal that gave at a speed of . Electricity was provided by six steam-driven dynamos.McLaughlin, pp. 181, 187.
Armament The main armament consisted of four Model 1895 40-caliber guns mounted in twin-gun turrets fore and aft. These guns had a maximum elevation of 35° and could depress to -5°. Eighty rounds per gun were carried and they could fire about one round per minute. The guns could be loaded at any angle between +5° and -3°. They fired a M1911 armour-piercing (AP) shell at a muzzle velocity of . At maximum elevation the guns had a range of .Friedman, pp. 252–253.
Eight of the fourteen 50-caliber Model 1905 guns were mounted in four twin-gun turrets at the corners of the superstructure while six were mounted in casemates in the superstructure. The turret-mounted guns had a rate of fire of two rounds per minute and a maximum elevation of +25° while the casemate guns were faster at 2.8 rounds per minute, but could only elevate to +19°. Each gun was provided with 128 rounds. Their M1913 shells weighed and were fired at a muzzle velocity of to a range of at an elevation of +15°10'.Friedman, p. 259.
For close-range defence against torpedo boats, the ships carried twelve guns mounted in casemates above the eight-inch guns in the superstructure. The corner guns were positioned to give them a clear field of fire over the eight-inch gun turrets. They had a rate of fire of 10 rounds per minute and the ships carried a total of 2,628 rounds (219 per gun) for them. While their maximum elevation was +23°, they had a range of at +18° using their AP shell.Friedman, p. 263.
Two underwater torpedo tubes were mounted, one on each side, and they were provided with six spare torpedoes.McLaughlin, p. 186. The ships would have used M1908 torpedoes that had three range/speed settings: at , at , or at .Friedman, p. 348.
Protection