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

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Warship Wednesday 14 October 2026: The Hard Luck Empress of the Black Sea

Above we see the Tsar Nicholas II touring the pride of his fleet, the newly commissioned dreadnought Imperatritsa Mariya (Empress Maria), her massive Obukhovskii 12″/52 Pattern 1907 guns framing the photo.

Just 15 months after she joined the fleet, she was lost, some 110 years ago this month, in an incident that is still seen by some as controversial.

Tsarist Dreadnought efforts

The Russians lost an incredible 17 pre-dreadnoughts and coastal battleships in two squadrons against the Japanese in the inferno in and around the Tsushima Straits and Port Arthur in 1904-05. Keep in mind this is more than twice the blow that the U.S. suffered to its battle line at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

These included eight sunk for good:

• Navarin
• Sisoy Velikiy
• Borodino
• Alexander III
• Suvorov
• Petropavlovsk
• Sevastopol
• Osliabia

And nine captured after Tsushima or raised from the mud at Port Arthur, then used as trophy ships:

• Nikolai I
• Oshakov
• Senyavin
• Apraksin
• Pobeda
• Poltava
• Orel
• Peresvet
• Retvizan

Sure, as some were grossly obsolete (the three Admiral Ushakov class vessels, for example) or ancient (Nikolai I had been ordered in the 1880s and could never make more than 15 knots even when new), starting with a clean slate in 1906 had a benefit to the Russian Admiralty entering the post-Dreadnought era.

Plus, they had earned reams of tactical knowledge about battleship design defects the worst way, at the cost of 6,000 sailors’ lives.

Left were the damaged French-built Tsesarevich (hit by 13 large shells and would need significant reconstruction), which was interned in China, 10 that were locked into the Black Sea by the pre-Montreux Convention Bosporus (Ekaterina II, Chesma, Sinop, Georgiy Pobedonosets, Dvenadtsat’ Apostolov, Tri Sviatitelia, Rostislav, Yevstafiy, Ioann Zlatoust, and the mutinous Potemkin), while the Baltic had three ships left that only survived because they had been incomplete when the war started (Andrei Pervozvanny, Imperator Pavel I, and Slava) and the old Alexandr II.

As the Baltic was the most battlewagon poor (the idea of a great Pacfic Fleet had been abandoned, replaced by a miserly Siberian Flotilla), the new 24,000-ton Gangut class (Sevastopol and Petropavlovsk from Baltic Works; Gangut and Poltava from the New Admiralty Yard) which carried a dozen new 12″/52 Obukhov guns in four triple turrets, could steam at 23-knots and were swathed in an 8-inch belt (earning them a battlecruiser brand in Jane’s) were ordered first in 1909 followed by the four massive 32,500-ton Borodino class battlecruisers (12 14″/45 guns, 12-inch belt, 26.5 knots) ordered in 1912.

The Ganguts were roughly equivalent to the German Helgolands, British Colossus, and American Florida-class 12-inch battleships of the era, and faster than any of the aforementioned, albeit with lighter armor.

All were to be built in yards around St. Petersburg with significant French (loans), German (Krupp armor, Siemens-Schuckert generators, and a shelved Blohm & Voss design), Italian (Vittorio Cuniberti design input) and most importantly, British assistance (machinery designed by John Brown & Company to include Parsons steam turbines and Yarrow small-tube boilers along with Barr & Stroud rangefinders and Pollen Argo range clocks, with Vickers supplying design help with main gun production) assistance with Holy Russian twists such as icebreaking bows, linear (lineinoe raspolozhenie) rather that superfiring main battery turrets, and elaborate Eastern Orthodox chapels.

As for the hate of superfiring turrets and their tall barbettes, the Russians believed that spacing the main-gun turrets and their magazines as far apart as the hull allowed would reduce the risk of a catastrophic ammunition explosion, lower the ship’s silhouette, and improve stability. Read that last sentence twice.

Via Jane’s, circa 1921 edition, you have the Ganguts followed by the Borodinos:

Meanwhile, for service in the Black Sea, the 1911 Naval Program authorized three new battlewagons constructed along its ancient shores, Imperatritsa Mariya and Imperator Alexandr III from Russud in Mykolaiv, and Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaya from the Naval Yard (ONZiV) at Nikolayev. The cost was between 27.7 million gold rubles for the Russud-built ships and 29.8 million for Ekaterina. Compare this to the 37 million ruble average cost per hull of the slightly larger Ganguts.

The Imperatritsa Mariyas were slightly smaller (23,000 tons and 551 feet oal vs 24,800 tons and 594 feet) than the Ganguts, but better protected (10-inch belt rather than eight-inch), and could be seen as a modification of the general concept.

Like the Ganguts and Borodinos, the Mariyas used Yarrow boilers and Parsons/Brown-Curtis turbines, though with fewer boilers, giving 26,000shp rather than the 42,000 seen in the Ganguts, and a more pokey 21 knots rather than the Ganguts‘ 24.

Of note, their Yarrow boilers were built under license in Kharkiv. Like the Ganguts, they could spray oil over the coal to superheat it, with oil supplied by nearby Maikop and Baku fields in the Caucasus.

American-style lattice masts were planned, but to speed things up, simple pole masts were used instead.

Wanting something bigger than the 12″/52 Obukhovs as ordered for the Gangut class, the 14-inch guns meant for the Borodinos were still under development, so it was decided just to settle for the dozen 12s with magazine space for 100 shells per gun. They were arranged in much the same linear, spread-out fashion as with the Ganguts, using the same Pulitov-made MK-3-12 triple turrets protected by 10 inches of armor.

After post-war tests on captured shells, the British admitted they could fire a 1,038-pound M1911 APC shell to 22,600 yards and that it outperformed their own 12-inch Mark VIIa Greenboys. They were thought capable of defeating 13.85 inches of armor at 10,000 yards– and nothing in the Black Sea had that much armor!

The secondary battery consisted of 20 casemated 5.1″/55 M1913 B-7 Obukhov/Vickers guns on a protected gun deck, rather than the older 6″/45 Pattern 1892 Obukhov/Canet guns seen in the rest of the fleet.

Counter-boat defense was provided by four 3″/48 Canet guns and four 47mm Hotchkiss guns, while a torpedo battery of four small 17.7-inch fixed tubes existed for a dozen Model 45-12 steam torpedoes which had a 2,200-yard range at 43 knots.

To keep the four separate magazines cool, the ship installed a refrigeration plant with two large 10,500 sq. ft. Westinghouse-LeBlanc condensers designed by the G. A. Lessner firm, aiming to keep them at a crisp 59 degrees F if needed, a must in the humid subtropical Black Sea region.

With the Ottomans ordering two modern dreadnoughts (Fatih Sultan Mehmed and Reşadiye) from Vickers in 1911 and, the next year, assuming the contract for a third from Armstrong (the Brazilian Rio de Janeiro, renamed Sultan Osman I), the Russians ordered a fourth, improved Mariya from Russud in 1913. The planned Imperator Nikolay I would have exceeded 27,000 tons and carried a better armor scheme, plus the additional horsepower to manage it, but she was never completed.

As it was, the Turks never saw any of their British dreadnoughts, anyway.

This all brings us to…

Meet Imperatritsa Mariya

Our subject was at least the third warship in the Russian Imperial Navy to carry the name of Empress Mariya Feodorovna Romanov, nee Duchess Sophie Dorothee of Württemberg, who was the strong hand behind the very young Alexander I, leader of the vast Russian Empire after the death of her husband (his father), the detested Tsar Paul I, in 1801.

The first was a two-decked, 84-gun third-rate ship of the line launched in 1827 and served in the Black Sea Fleet until 1843. The second, also an 84-gun man-o-war, was key to the Russian battle line at the Battle of Sinop against the Ottomans in 1853, serving as Admiral Pavel Nakhimov’s flagship.

Laid down at the Russud yard at Nikolayev on 30 October 1911 alongside sister ship Alexandr III, our Mariya took to the water two years later on 1 November 1913.

Her obvious patron was the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar), wife of the late Tsar Alexander III and mother of Nicky.

Alexandr III would follow her down the ways in April 1914.

War!

Delivered to Sevastopol on 30 June 1915, with the Turks very much in the war and the German battlecruiser Goeben running amok in the Black Sea, Mariya was rushed to sea trials, which proved the low-lying dreadnought was a bit of a hog underway, her bow more of a plow.

Also, her air-conditioned magazines would have been a welcome relief when the average summer temperature in the Crimea was in the upper 80s and humid, but they didn’t work.

To mitigate the problem, she was lightly loaded forward, trimming anchor chain and reducing No. 1 magazine stowage from 300 12-inch and 980 5.1-inch to 210 and 400, respectively, while keeping her coal and oil bunkers well under their 3,000- and 720-ton full loads.

Even with a half-bunker load, she could still make 1,500nm at 12 knots, more than enough for a short 700-mile roundtrip sortie across the Black Sea to bombard Trabzon, Samsun, or the approaches to the Bosporus.

Mariya’s first skipper was Capt. Casimir Porembski, a 43-year-old Polish-born regular who entered the Naval Academy in 1889 and served as a senior officer on the cruiser Novik during the war with Japan. He reported aboard in November 1913 while she was still under construction and remained her commander through March 1916, in charge of the Black Sea’s most powerful battleship.

By September 1915, she was operational as the flagship of the 2nd Battleship Squadron, alongside the pre-dreadnoughts Panteleimon (ex-Potempkin), Yevstafiy, and Ioann Zlatoust.

She saw her first combat in a raid with her squadron along the Turkish coast at Zonguldak (13-15 October), bombarding Varna (2-4 November) and Euxinograd (6-8 November) Bulgaria, and then provided her 12-inch guns as muscle for the Trebizond operation which saw 15,000 Russians landed at Rizem on 5 March 1916 to envelope the left flank of the 3rd Turkish Army, which at the time was fighting the invasion Russian Caucasian Army, and eventually capture Trebizond by 18 April.

Afterward, the Tsar and Tsarevitch, Empress, and three Grand Duchesses reviewed her in May 1916, leaving a large collection of images from the event.

On 8 July 1916, VADM Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak, who had made a name for himself in mine operations against the Germans in the Baltic and would later lead the Siberian theatre of the Russian Civil War, arrived at Sevastopol and assumed command of the Black Sea Fleet, making Mariya his flagship.

Just days later, he was aboard Mariya off the Turkish coast when they came within 90 cables (about nine miles) of the German light cruiser Breslau (Turkish Midilli), which immediately used her better speed to avoid the Russians’ incoming 12-inch shells and make her getaway in a smoke screen. Still, it was the last Black Sea sortie by Breslau and/or Goeben in 1916, which Russian scholars generally attribute to a lack of appetite for tangling with a proper battlewagon.

It was a precursor to the reason Kolchak was sent south in the first place– the Bosforskuyu operatsiyu, or Bosporus Operation, the planned November 1916 landings to capture the Eastern straits by the newly formed Separate Black Sea Naval Infantry Division under Maj. Gen. Alexander Svechin, backed by two Russian army corps, the 29th and 40th.

In the lead-up to the operation, Kolchak ordered 17 minefields laid near the Bosphorus with 4,000 mines deployed, effectively sealing the Turks and Germans in the straits.

Kolchak’s plan hinged on two dreadnoughts, Mariya and her sister Yekaterina Velikaya (Catherine the Great), which would enter service at the end of October, with their combined 24 12-inch guns, leading his pre-dreadnoughts and four seaplane tenders (hydro-aviation transports).

However, Kolchak’s plan soon hit two major roadblocks.

First, when Romania entered the war in late August and collapsed by early December, the two army corps that were to land after his marines were rushed instead into the Danube Delta to join Sakharov’s forces propping up that weak ally.

Then Mariya exploded a half-mile from shore at the Sevastopol roadstead at 0615 on 20 October 1916. The explosion dislodged the forward turret. The conning tower, foremast, and funnel were blown into the air, and the upper deck, up to the second turret, was exposed, killing 320 of her 1,100 crew and sending a 1,000-foot column of black smoke from her bow.

Kolchak, who was ashore, rushed to the scene and was reportedly aboard her 15 minutes after, supervising the flooding of her remaining magazines and evacuation of the 85 injured. He also ordered her newly commissioned sister, Yekaterina Velikaya, and the old Yevstafiy towed to a safer location if the rest of the ship went up in flame.

Suffering from 25 subsequent explosions as the fires spread down her hull, igniting coal, fuel oil, and ammunition, she capsized keel-up at a depth of 8.5 fathoms at 0717.

Her skipper at the time, Capt. Ivan Semenovich Kuznetsov, was relieved and put on trial pending an investigation into the loss of his proud ship.

Some believe the “Kontrol-K” spy ring, led by German intelligence officer Viktor Eduardovich Verman, sabotaged the Russian battlewagon. FSB archives (the successor to the KGB) state that Verman was supposedly awarded Germany’s Iron Cross 2nd Class for the deed. He was rolled up in 1932 by the OGPU and executed.

However, Mariya was most likely lost in a magazine explosion, a sadly common hazard for battleships of the era.

Similarly, the French battleships Iéna (1907) and Liberté (1911), the Japanese Kawachi (1918), British HMS Vanguard (1917), and the Italian Leonardo da Vinci (1916) all perished in magazine explosions while in friendly ports. Bagged nitrocellulose cordite, chemically sensitive to temperature, and combustible coal dust inside steel hulls proved notoriously volatile.

Epilogue

While Kolchak’s Bosphoros Operation was kicked down the road to May 1917, when it was thought Mariya’s sister, Imperator Alexandr III, would be complete, the Revolution intervened, and the admiral was instead sent on a naval mission to America on behalf of the Provisional Government to soft shoe for military aid.

By the time the Reds took over the government in the October Revolution, the effects on the fleet were quick, and Mariya’s last skipper, Kuznetsov, was led out and shot along the seawall in Sevastopol along with a group of senior officers.

Her first commander, the Pole Porembsky, was cashiered and escaped the hellfire of the Russian Civil War, given a general’s rank in the newly formed Polish Army, and later transitioned to the Polish Navy, which he led by 1925 as a vice admiral.

As for the hulk of Mariya, they raised and refloated her upside down, slowly, from November 1917 to May 1918, by which time Russia had left the Great War, and the Germans were in Sevastopol on occupation duties.

Mariya was towed to the large drydock at Sevastopol in August 1918, where she was stripped of useful material, including most of her 5.1″/55s, which were quickly used to arm river gunboats and barges during the Russian Civil War. She was eventually scrapped by 1927.

While some sources claim her 12-inch guns ended up in coastal artillery emplacements, that does not seem to hold water. All four turrets and a full dozen guns fell to the seabed after she turned turtle in 1916 and remained there until at least the mid-1930s, when the ERPRON salvage group pulled them up and likely scrapped many of them in poor condition.

Soviet myth had it that:

Shortly before the Great Patriotic War, Epronov’s crews raised these turrets, and in 1939 the battleship’s 305mm guns were mounted near Sevastopol on the renowned 30th Battery, part of the 1st Coastal Defense Artillery Division. The battery heroically defended Sevastopol; on June 17, 1942, during the final assault on the city, it fired at the Nazi hordes that had broken through into the Belbek Valley. Having expended all its shells, the battery fired blanks, holding back the enemy advance until June 25. Thus, more than a quarter of a century after firing at the Kaiser’s cruisers Goeben and Breslau, the battleship Empress Maria’s guns spoke again, raining down 305-mm shells, this time on Hitler’s troops.

However, although the four 12″/52s were of the same type as those salvaged from Mariya, they were purpose-built for the coast artillery task and shipped down to the Crimea in 1928 for the Maxim Gorky Battery 30.

They still exist, served until 1968, and are preserved in a museum.

The Soviets managed to recondition three of Mariya’s salvaged guns and returned them to service as railway guns. One even survived a stint in Finnish service.

As for her sisters, Yekaterina Velikaya became Svobodnaya Rossiya (Free Russia) after the Tsar fell, and the Reds towed her from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk in April 1918 to keep the functional battleship out of German hands. She was later scuttled in June, sunk by torpedoes from the Red destroyer Kerch, and later salvaged.

Imperator Alexandr III was never fully completed and was renamed Volia after the Revolution. Captured by the Germans in 1918, she was put in limited service to the Kaiserliche Marine as SMS Volya before passing to Allied control after the Armistice. Transferred to the White Russian fleet, she served as General Alekseyev, its flagship, then sailed into exile with Wrangel in November 1920 to Bizerte, Tunisia, where the French interned her until she was scrapped in 1936, her 12-inch guns going on to circle the globe.

Imperator Nikolai I was launched in October 1916, and the work on her was suspended the following October. Never brought into service, the Reds renamed her Demokratiya (Democracy). She fell into German hands in 1918, then the Allies destroyed her in 1919 to prevent her from falling back into the Reds’ hands, and the Soviets finally broke her up in 1927.

This left the Russians without a functional Black Sea dreadnought for over a decade until the Gangut-class Parizhskaya Kommuna (“Paris Commune,” formerly Sevastopol) was transferred from the Baltic in 1930.

Thanks for reading!

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

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