The Tsars Battleship Russalka

Cutting Edge RussianMonitor built to Control the 19th Century Baltic

Nov 12, 2008

Built on the same design of the USS Monitor, the Russalka guarded St Petersburg for 30 years

Arise of the Ironclads

After the clash of the Monitor and Merrimack in 1862, a naval arms race began to equip ironclad steamers for war. Within a few years nearly twenty countries had built 250 ironclad warships. The Imperial Russian Navy of the Romanov Tsar Alexander II was no exception. Although small compared to other fleets in the world the 19th century Russian Navy had to content with regional threats from Sweden in the Baltic Sea and Ottoman Turkey in the Black. The Ottoman Empire built 19 ironclad ships between 1864-1875.

The Royal Swedish Navy also placed 4 new Ironclad ships in the water in the same time period. As a response, the Russian navy contracted some 29 new ironclad vessels. One of these was the Russalka (Mermaid).

Specifications of the Russalka

Constructed along with her sister ship Charodeika the pair were built at the Admiralty Shipyard in St. Petersburg. The class was 62.2m (204 feet) long with a rather wide 12.8m beam (42 feet) and a draught of 3.3m (10.8ft). This meant she could float in just two fathoms of calm water under her almost flat-bottomed hull. Still water is what she was built for too, with her decks only .78m (30 inches) above the waterline. She was built for coastal fighting in the hundreds of jetties and bays along the Baltic’s rugged coastline but as such had a very low freeboard and poor sea keeping abilities. This design also led to insufficient flood ability and damage stability. Powered by a 705hp boiler-powered steam turbine engine with a single screw the 1800-ton ironclad steel hulled ship could make 9 knots when new. Her 178 man crew manned the exhausting coal-fired boilers and two pair of 228mm turreted naval rifles. Started in 1866 less than a year after the end of the US Civil War, the Russalka took to the cool waters of the Baltic on August 31, 1867.

Problems with sea keeping

In 1869 she was involved in a minor collision with another vessel. Although she suffered very slight damage and took on just a few tons of water she could only be saved from sinking by running aground. Because of the incident, Ensign Stepan Markarov, later to become one of the most famous Russian Admirals, invented the collision mat, a damage control device used to this day on sea-going vessels. It should be realized that the ironclads of the era were succeptable to being victims of poor sea keeping and slight accidents. The USS Monitor herself was lost in a storm only two years after she was built. The Russian Ironclad Admiral Lazareff was holed in 1871 by another Russian ironclad, the Admiral Spirdoff in maneuvers and sank. This accident was replayed by a pair of British Ironclads in 1875 (with the HMS Vanguard sinking), French ironclads in 1877 and German Ironclads in 1878 (with the Grosser Kurfurst sinking).

Sources

Greene, Jack and Alessandro Massignani. Ironclads at War: The Origin and Development of the Armored Warship, 1854-1891. Conshohocken PA: Combined Books, 1998.

The copyright of the article The Tsars Battleship Russalka in WW I History is owned by Christopher Eger. Permission to republish The Tsars Battleship Russalka in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.