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Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period, profiling a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday (on a Friday) 13 February 2026: The Russian Cruiser that Accounted for Three German ones

(Sorry for the two-day delay, boys. This was a long one!)

Above we see the fine 1st rank protected cruiser Bogatyr of the Imperial Russian Navy, in her circa 1904-05 dark green war paint, as she rests in Zolotoy Rog (Golden Horn Bay) with a burgeoning young Vladivostok sprawling in the distance.

Constructed and later dismantled in Germany, she made the Japanese admiralty howl (briefly) in 1904, then, somehow, survived that maelstrom to exact three pounds of flesh from the Kaiserliche Marine in the Great War.

The Great 1900s Russian Cruiser Rush

After that fearsome bear Tsar Alexander III passed unexpectedly in 1894 and left his woefully unprepared son, Nicky, with the autocratic throne of Holy Mother Russia, things got a bit weird. While both Alexander (who had successfully commanded a 70,000-strong force in the combat against the Ottomans in 1877-78) and his son (who had risen to the rank of colonel and commanded a cavalry squadron on summer maneuvers) were trained army officers, as Tsar, Nicky pursued a curious naval policy, one that aimed to make Russia a great power on the sea rather than a regional power capable of besting, say, the Turks or Sweden, the country’s traditional foes. The weak new Tsar was muscled into this way of thinking by a trio of professional naval officers in his family, his older uncles Alexei and Sergei Alexandrovich, and cousin “Sandro” Mikhailovich, all “big fleet” advocates.

This was abetted in no small part by Nicky’s cousin, Willy, the German Kaiser, who not only whispered about great naval power but also pointed the young Tsar’s eye away from Europe and to the Pacific, where a British-allied Japan was growing ever more powerful.

Not able to weaken its fleets in the Black Sea (against the Turks), or the Baltic (against Sweden, or, say, maybe, Germany as Russia was officially an ally of France after 1892), this required a whole new force for the Pacific. The distinct possibility of having to defend Russian overseas shipping from the British while also dispatching raiders to disrupt Britannia’s own merchant traffic was also a problem that needed solving, at least until the two countries buried the hatchet in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.

All this meant modern new battleships and cruisers, destroyers and gunboats. And lots of them.

The first modern protected cruiser in Russian service was the circa 1895 French (FCM)-built Svetlana (3,682t, 331 ft oal, 21 kts, 6 x 6″/45 guns, up to 4″ of armor), followed by the three larger domestically-built Pallada/Diana- class ships (6,687t, 416 ft oal, 19 kts, 8 x 6″/45 guns, up to 6″ of armor), and two very similar ships: the American (Cramp)-built Varyag (6,500t, 425 ft oal, 23 kts, 12 x 6″/45 guns, up to 6″ of armor), and the German (Germaniawerft)-built Askold (5,900t, 434 ft oal, 23.8 kts, 12 x 6″/45 guns, up to 6″ of armor), which were built abroad simoultanously.

Our subject was originally a stand-alone design similar in size but slightly larger (6,645 tons, 439 feet oal) than the Varyag and Askold, while being roughly the same speed and still carrying a similar armament and armor scheme. This made her a rough equivalent to the British cruiser HMS Highflyer and the French Chateaureneau.

Meet Bogatyr

Our subject is at least the third such warship in service to the Tsar, going back to the first steam frigate built in the Russian Empire in 1836, to carry the name “Bogatyr,” which roughly translates to “hero,” common to early Russian epics.

The second Bogatyr was a circa 1860 spar frigate and class leader of three sisters (Varyag, Vityaz, and Askold— these names seem to keep repeating themselves!) that was key in early Russian power projection outside of Europe

Our third Bogatyr, like Askold, was ordered on 5 August 1898 from Germany, but this time not from Germaniawerft. Instead, she was ordered to a design from Vulcan Stettin and laid down as Yard No. 427 on 22 December 1899.

Whereas Askold ran a very distinctive five, thin funnels, and Varyag had four, Bogatyr emulated the Pallada and Svetlana classes with three thick pipes.

Her thickest armor, some 5.5 inches, was protecting her casemate, while she still had 5 inches over her main battery turrets, as well as 3 inches in her casemates and deck. Her shell hoists and other vital systems recived at least two inches.

She shipped 765 tons of armor and had 16 watertight bulkheads. A total of 1.83 million steel rivets were used in her construction. Four Siemens dynamos provided electrical power.

Her main battery was a dozen 6″/45 Pattern 1892 French Canet guns (made under license by Obukhov and installed in Russia), with four in two twin turrets, one fore and one aft, and the other eight in broadside casemates or shielded single mounts. Her magazines carried 2,160 6-inch shells.

Bogatyr’s secondary battery was a dozen 3″/50 Pattern 1892 Canet/Obukhov deck guns with 3,600 shells to feed them, while a tertiary battery of eight QF 3-pounder (47mm) Hotchkiss and two 1-pounder 5-barreled Hotchkiss Gatling guns provided torpedo boat defense.

Speaking of torpedoes, Bogatyr had five small 15-inch tubes (1 bow, 2 beam, 2 stern) and carried 12 fish in her magazines. She also had storage below deck for 35 small defensive mines.

Her complement of 17 officers, 6 officials (medical, JAG, etc.), and 551 enlisted men could provide a company-sized landing force for duty ashore, for which she carried enough Mosin rifles and marching gear to outfit, as well as two Maxim heavy machine guns and two light 37mm Baranovsky landing guns on wheeled carriages.

Bogatyr launched on 17 January 1901 and spent the next 18 months fitting out.

Her first skipper, appointed 15 February 1899, was Capt. 1st Rank Alexander Fedorovich Stemman, a career officer who joined the Naval cadet corps in 1871, sailed the world on the old frigate Svetlana, fought against the Turks in 1877 on the Danube, sailed the Pacific on the spar frigate Duke of Edinburgh, commanded the destroyer Krechet, the mine cruiser Gaydamak, and the coastal defense battleship (monitor) Lava before heading to Germany to join Bogatyr’s plankowners.

In June 1902, on speed trials in the Gulf of Danzig, Bogatyr touched 23.9 knots, and at the end of July was toured at Stettin by the Kaiser himself.

Delivered to the Russian Navy in August 1902, she was immediately dispatched to the Pacific Squadron.

She looked very similar in profile to the Vulcan-built Japanese armored cruiser Yakumo, which also had three funnels and two masts, and a gun arrangement of two two-gun turrets and the rest in broadside. Yakumo was gently larger, at 9,000 tons, and carried a mix of 16 8- and 6-inch guns compared to Bogatyr’s 12 6-inchers, but you get the idea.

The Russian Admiralty was so taken with the design that it ordered four more or less exact copies of Bogatyr in 1900-02 from four domestic yards, two in the Baltic and two in the Black Sea: Vityaz from Galernyy Is, St. Petersburg; Oleg from the New Admiralty Yard, St. Petersburg; Kagul from the Admiralty Yard in Nikolayev (Mykolaiv) Ukraine; and Ochakov from the Lazarev Admiralty Yard in Sevastopol.

Of these, Vityaz was destroyed by fire on the stocks by fire in June 1901, but the other three started arriving in the fleet in the 1904-05 time frame.

A “rocky” war with Japan

Assigned to the RADM Karl Petrovich Jessen’s Vladivostok-based Separate Cruiser Detachment along with the larger armored cruisers Rossia, Gromoboi, and Rurik, and the auxiliary cruiser Lena, Bogatyr avoided the slow death of the bulk of the Russian Pacific Squadron trapped in Port Arthur when the Japanese attacked without warning in February 1904.

In this, she earned her dark green war paint.

Jessen’s roaming cruisers went to work haunting the Korean Strait and the waters around Japan over the next several months, sinking 10 transports and 12 schooners, as well as capturing five other merchants. This effort diverted six Japanese armored cruisers to chase them down, weakening Adm. Togo’s force off Port Arthur.

Bogatyr was with the squadron for their first kill, on 12 February, sinking the 1,800-ton merchant ship Nakanoura Maru just off the Tsugaru Strait.

She was also there when the 220-ton Japanese coaster Haginoura Maru was sunk in the Sea of Japan off Korea on 25 April, followed by the 4,000-ton armed transport Kinshu Maru the next day.

The Kinshu Maru incident was particularly noteworthy in Japanese martial lore as, by legend, the ship’s crew surrendered and were taken off while the company of guardsmen aboard refused such dishonor, choosing instead to fire at the Russian cruisers with their rifles as the transport was sunk via torpedo. Some 51 waterlogged soldiers and sailors were later picked up by the Japanese schooner Chihaya and landed at Kobe on 30 April.

She would be our subject’s last combat of her first war.

While creeping around in the fog on the morning of 15 May 1904, Bogatyr’s bow struck rocks at Cape Bryus in Amur Bay, sustaining considerable damage.

After being almost written off, she was finally freed on 18 June and, patched, was towed into Vladivostok for repairs.

Bogatyr remained under repair throughout the Russo-Japanese War while her skipper, Capt. Stemman was reassigned to the Vladivostok fortress. He never commanded another ship and retired from the Navy in 1911 after 40 years in uniform. He was made a VADM on the retired list for his past service. He passed in 1914, aged 58.

Bogatyr’s sister Oleg likewise escaped an early demise during the conflict, eluding Togo’s bruisers at Tsushima long enough to be interned under U.S. guns in the Philippines.

Meanwhile, sister Ochakov, left in Europe with a skeleton crew, mutinied in 1905 in conjunction with the battleship Potemkin and, after a delusory shootout with ships and coastal batteries loyal to the government, suffered 52 large caliber hits and was left to burn. Rebuilt over four years, Ochakov was renamed Kagul to escape the revolutionary stain. For some unknown reason, the existing Kagul, another one of Bogatyr’s Russian-built sisters, was renamed Pamiat’ Merkuria (Memory of Mercury), at the same time, I guess, to muddy the waters as if Ochakov had never existed.

Interbellum

Once the war with Japan was over, the old Russian Pacific Squadrons (both of them) had ceased to exist, with the few hulls left afloat and in Russian custody reorganized into the rump destroyer-heavy Siberian Military Flotilla, with the more capable ships transferred back to the Baltic to make up losses there. This saw Bogatyr transfer to Kronstadt.

She became a stepping stone for several upwardly mobile professional officers, with her next five skippers (Bostrem, Vasilkovsky, Girs, Petrov-Chernyshin, and Vorozheikin) all later pinning on admiral’s stars. As a side note, Vasilkovsky was later shot by the Cheka during the Red Terror of Sevastopol in 1918, while Girs was drowned in the Gulf of Finland by the Petrograd Cheka at roughly the same time.

Still, they were no doubt happy during this quiet time in the ship’s history, and I’d bet that at the time never saw it coming.

Between the wars, Bogatyr participated in a series of training cruises back and forth from the Baltic to the Black Sea via the Mediterranean.

It was while in the company of the cruiser Admiral Makarov and battleships Tsarevich and Slava that news of the December 1908 Messina earthquake broke. RADM Litvinov immediately sent ships to join the international response to the disaster. Sailors from Bogatyr were among the first to come to the aid of the inhabitants of Messina buried under the rubble. In total, Russian sailors rescued about 1,000 people from the ruins.

In 1911, Bogatyr picked up a Telefunken radio system. In the same overhaul, she landed her two Hotchkiss 37mm Gatling guns and two of her torpedo tubes.

Her seventh skipper, Capt. 1st Rank Evgeny Ivanovich Krinitsky assumed command in August 1912. The captain of the destroyer Silny, which distinguished herself in the defense of Port Arthur in 1904, was a solid naval hero who earned the St. George cross for the war. Wounded and only slightly recovered during his stint as a POW in Japan, he was further wounded by a mutinous sailor’s bayonet during the 1906 uprising in Kronstadt. He came to Bogatyr after command of the old minelaying cruiser Ladoga.

Bogatyr was on hand in the Baltic when French President Raymond Poincaré visited with Nicky on the eve of the Great War.

War (Again)

Part of the Russian Baltic Fleet’s 2nd Cruiser Squadron when the war began, Bogatyr, with naval hero Krinitsky still in command, was urgently dispatched on 13 August 1914, along with the cruiser Pallada, to Odenholm Island off the northern coast of modern Estonia. There, on a rock since the night before, was pinned the grounded German light cruiser SMS Magdeburg, with the destroyer V-26 busily taking off her 370-man crew.

Bogatyr and Rossia interrupted the scuttling, with V-26 fleeing and Magdeburg’s remaining crew setting off a scuttling charge that broke her back after an exchange of gunfire. Bogatyr captured three officers, including Capt. (ZS) Richard Habenicht, three mechanical engineers, and 51 sailors from the destroyed German cruiser, and, much more importantly, recovered a waterlogged bag full of code books and important ship’s papers from the shallows around the ship. A second signal book and a rough draft of a radiogram reporting the clash were found in Magdeburg’s radio room and proved especially useful for cryptologists in London, Paris, and Petrograd for the rest of the war.

With the Russian fleet taking the wise step to seal the Eastern Baltic shut with mines, Bogatyr received rails and chutes to carry as many as 100 M08 mines on deck.

One of her fields was credited with extensively damaging the German light cruiser SMS Augsburg off Bornholm on the night of 24–25 January 1915, and she struck a mine, knocking her out of the war for four months.

For these actions, Krinitsky received his second St. George in as many wars and was promoted to rear admiral, replaced in January 1915 by Capt. Dmitry Nikolaevich Verderevsky, former skipper of the cruiser Admiral Makarov.

Soon after the Baltic thaw, Bogatyr and her sister Oleg, working with the 8-inch gunned armored cruiser Bayan, participated in the Battle of Aland Islands on 2 July 1915, during which they drove the German light minelaying cruiser SMS Albatross onto the beach in neutral Swedish waters just off Ostergarn. Riddled with six 8-inch shells from Bayan and 20 6-inchers from Bogatyr and Oleg, Albatross was a loss, but the Russians were deprived of their trophy.

Nonetheless, Bogatyr had accounted for her third German cruiser in less than a year. Her skipper, Verderevsky, earned a St. George of his own.

With the writing on the wall for mine warfare in the Baltic, Bogatyr was laid up in late 1915 for a further conversion in which she was fitted to carry as many as 150 mines. To allow for the extra space and weight, her dozen 6″/45 Canet guns, 12 3″/50s, and 8 Hotchkiss 3-pounders were replaced with an all-up battery of 16 5.1″/55 Pattern 1913 (B-7) Vickers-Obukhov guns. Likewise, her final torpedo tubes were removed.

After quiet service laying minefields and conducting coastal operations, Verderevsky left the ship in December 1916 to assume a rear admiral’s post over a submarine squadron at Revel, while he handed the cruiser over to Capt. Koptev Sergei Dmitrievich, who was cashiered shortly after the Revolution and would die of pneumonia in 1920, aged just 39.

Speaking of Revolutions, one of Bogatyr’s sailors, a 25-year-old boatswain’s mate by the name of Aleksandr Kondratyevich “Ales” Gurlo, took part in both of them, leading a detachment from the ship in the siege and later storming of the Winter Palace in November 1917. Continuing to fight for the Reds against Kolchak in Siberia, post-war, he became something of a poet, publishing five collections by the late 1920s.

Under a Red Star

After the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Germans and their allies on 15 December 1917, leading to the formal Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, Russia’s Great War was over, replaced by a civil war that would drag on until 1924.

What this meant for the Russian Baltic Fleet was that the ships based in the frozen ports of the Baltic states and Finland, which the Germans meant to occupy, needed to be saved from capture and pulled back to Red Kronstadt. This great retreat, conducted between 16 February 1918 and 20 April 1918, was dubbed the “Ice Cruise” by the Russians and involved successfully moving 236 ships and vessels, including six battleships, five cruisers (our Bogatyr included), 59 destroyers, and 12 submarines.

Ensign Beno Eduardovich von Gebhard, a mysterious figure, was Bogatyr’s elected skipper during the Ice Cruise. He was dispatched shortly after for reasons lost to history.

The Red commander of the Baltic Fleet that pulled off the Ice Cruise against all odds with no coal, near mutinous crews ruled by committee, and few remaining engineers, was Capt. Alexey Mikhailovich Shchastny. Just after the fleet was solidified in Kronstadt, Shchastny was executed under orders of Trotsky for the “treason” of saving the Baltic Fleet. No heroes from the officer class were allowed.

In November 1918, Bogatyr and her sister Oleg participated in the aborted invasion of Estonia by the Red Army, at a time when most of the rest of the fleet’s sailors were rushed to the front to fight the Whites on four different fronts.

By this time, a British cruiser-destroyer force under RADM Sir Walter Cowan was operating in the Eastern Baltic. While Bogatyr never scrapped with the British, Oleg was torpedoed and sunk on the night of 17 June 1919 in a daring CMB raid on Kronstadt.

Bogatyr’s last listed skipper was Red LT Vladimir Andreevich Kukel, who left the ship with her crew at the end of June 1919 for the Volga-Caspian Military Flotilla, to fight Wrangel’s Whites in the South. Once the party was through with Kukel and there was no more fighting to be done, he was arrested and shot, then posthumously “rehabilitated” in 1958.

By the time Kronstadt was in turn the subject of a revolt against the Bolsheviks in March 1921, leaving hundreds dead and 8,000 sailors fleeing to Finland on foot over the ice once the Red Army moved in, Bogatyr had long before been abandoned and neglected. She was disarmed, towed away, and scrapped in 1922– by a German firm– while the wreck of her sister Oleg, sunk in the Kronstadt shallows, was slowly broken up by local means well into the 1930s.

Another of Bogatyr’s sisters, Kagul (the ex-revolutionary Ochakov), was captured by advancing German troops in the Black Sea in March 1918, then captured by British and French troops post-Armistice. Transferred to the Whites, she was renamed General Kornilov after their fallen leader and, when the Whites evacuated Crimea in November 1920, was sailed into exile in Bizerte and interned by the French government, who broke her up in 1933.

Ironically, the head of the White Russian exile Naval Corps in Bizerte during that era was (former) RADM Vorozheikin, who had commanded Bogatyr in 1911. Old Vorozheikin died there in Tunisia in the late 1930s, reportedly spending his last years maintaining the salvaged ships’ libraries of the scrapped exile fleet.

Epilogue

Of Bogatyr’s most significant Great War Tsarist-era skippers, the Russo-Japanese War hero Krinitsky– who was her commander during the capture of the Magdeburg— was dismissed from the service he gave everything to in 1918, then spent the rest of his life living quietly under the Bolshevik regime as an electrician at a printing machine factory, passing in 1930.

The second, Verderevsky, who commanded her in the Ahland Islands against Albatross, was (briefly) the commander of the Baltic Fleet in early 1917, then Kerensky’s naval minister, arrested by the Bolsheviks (including, ironically, a detachment of sailors from Bogatyr) in the Winter Palace along with other members of the Provisional Government during the “10 Days that Shook the World.” He lived in exile in the West until 1947, and post-WWII warmed to the Moscow government, receiving Soviet citizenship just before he passed in France at age 73.

Bogatyr’s final sister, Pamiat Merkuria, had exchanged fire with the Germans and Ottomans in the Black Sea during WWI on at least 10 separate occasions. When the Revolution and Civil War era came, she was stripped of her armament and armor, used to build war trains, while her crew had been scattered.

Sabotaged and vandalized by successive waves of interventionist foreign armies, Whites, and Reds, she was rebuilt with salvaged guns and parts from Oleg and, in 1923, recommissioned as the slow and under-armed training cruiser/minelayer Komintern.

Nonetheless, she got in several licks against the Germans in 1941-42, then was sunk in shallow water by Luftwaffe air attacks; her guns were salvaged and moved ashore to keep fighting.

Afterall, it was in her blood.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

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