Baltic Fleet
The Baltic Fleet is the fleet of the Russian Navy in the Baltic Sea.
Established 18 May 1703, under Tsar Peter the Great as part of the Imperial Russian Navy, the Baltic Fleet is the oldest Russian fleet. In 1918, the fleet was inherited by the Russian SFSR which then founded the Soviet Union in 1922, where it was eventually known as the Twice Red Banner Baltic Fleet as part of the Soviet Navy, as during this period it gained the two awards of the Order of the Red Banner. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Baltic Fleet was inherited by the Russian Federation and reverted to its original name as part of the Russian Navy.
The Baltic Fleet is headquartered in Kaliningrad and its main base is in Baltiysk, both in Kaliningrad Oblast, while another base is in Kronstadt, Saint Petersburg, in the Gulf of Finland.
Imperial Russia
The Imperial Russian Baltic Fleet was created during the Great Northern War at the initiative of Tsar Peter the Great, who ordered the first ships for the Baltic Fleet to be constructed at Lodeynoye Pole in 1702 and 1703. The first commander was a recruited Dutch admiral, Cornelius Cruys, who in 1723 was succeeded by Count Fyodor Apraksin. In 1703, the main base of the fleet was established in Kronshtadt. One of the fleet's first actions was the taking of Shlisselburg.In 1701 Peter the Great established a special school, the School of Mathematics and Navigation, situated in the Sukharev Tower in Moscow. As the territory to the west around the Gulf of Finland was acquired by Russia for a "warm-water" port giving access for its merchantmen and the buildup of a naval force, the city of Saint Petersburg was built and developed an extensive port. The School of Mathematics and Navigation was moved to St. Petersburg and in 1752 it was renamed the Naval Cadet Corps. Today it is the Saint Petersburg Naval Institute – Peter the Great Naval Corps.
File:Shtandart 001.jpg|thumb|left|A modern replica of the fleet's first vessel, the 24-gun three-masted frigate Shtandart
The Baltic Fleet began to receive new vessels in 1703. The fleet's first vessel was the 24-gun three-masted frigate Shtandart. She was the fleet's flagship, and is a prime example of the increasing role of the frigate design.
By 1724, the fleet boasted 141 sail warships and hundreds of oar-propelled vessels.
During the Great Northern War, the Baltic Fleet assisted in taking Viborg, Tallinn,, Riga,, the West Estonian archipelago, Helsinki,, and Turku. The first claimed victories of the new Imperial Russian Navy were the Gangut in 1714 and, arguably, the Grengam in 1720. From 1715, the English Royal Navy intervened in the Baltic Sea on behalf of the German principality of Hanover, and more or less in a tacit alliance with Russia.
During the concluding stages of the war, the Russian fleet would land troops along the Swedish coast to devastate coastal settlements. However, after the death of King Charles XII, the Royal Navy would rather protect Swedish interests after a rapprochement between the Kingdom of Sweden and King George I. A Russian attempt to reach the Swedish capital of Stockholm was checked at the Battle of Stäket in 1719. The losses suffered by the Russian Navy at the Grengam in 1720, as well as the arrival of a Royal Navy squadron under Admiral John Norris, also prevented further operations of any greater scale before the war ended in 1721.
During the "Seven Years' War",, the Russian Baltic Sea fleet was active on the Pomeranian coast of northern Germany and Prussia, helping the infantry to take Memel in 1757 and Kolberg in 1761. The Øresund was blockaded in order to prevent the British Navy from entering the Baltic sea. During the Russo-Swedish War the fleet, commanded by Samuel Greig and Vasily Chichagov, checked the Swedes at Hogland, Reval, and Viborg. An impetuous Russian attack on the Swedish galley flotilla on 9 July 1790 at the Second Battle of Svensksund resulted in a disaster for the Russian Navy who lost some 9,500 out of 14,000 men and about one third of their flotilla. The Russian defeat in this battle effectively ended the war.
During the series of Russo-Turkish Wars,, the fleet sailed into the Mediterranean Sea on the First and Second Archipelago Expeditions and destroyed the Ottoman Imperial Navy at the sea Battles of Chesma, the Dardanelles, Athos, and Navarino. At about the same time, Russian Admiral Ivan Krusenstern circumnavigated the globe, while another Baltic Fleet officer – Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen – discovered the southern ice-covered continent, Antarctica.
In the Crimean War,, the fleet – although stymied in its operations by the absence of steamships – prevented the British and French Allies from occupying Hangö, Sveaborg, and Saint Petersburg. Despite being greatly outnumbered by the technologically superior Allies, it was the Russian Fleet that introduced into naval warfare such novelties as torpedo mines, invented by Boris Yakobi. Other outstanding inventors who served in the Baltic Fleet were Alexander Stepanovich Popov, Stepan Makarov, Alexei Krylov, and Alexander Mozhaiski.
Age of iron
As early as 1861, the first armor-clad ships were built for the Baltic Fleet. In 1863, during the American Civil War, most of the fleet's ocean-going ships, including the flagship Alexander Nevsky were sent to New York City. At the same time ten Uragan-class monitors based on the American-designed Passaic-class monitors were launched.It was the policy of the Tsar and his government to show support for the Northern Union Army in the United States during their Civil War, observing and exchanging naval tactics and cooperation. In 1869, the fleet commissioned the first turret on a battleship in the world – Petr Veliky. Furthermore, in the second half of the 19th and early 20th Century a strong network of coastal artillery batteries was created to cover the approaches to St. Petersburg, Riga, and other important bases.
Russo-Japanese War
By 1900, decades of modernization on the Baltic as well as the Pacific Fleet made Russia the fourth strongest country in the world in terms of naval forces after the UK, France and Germany, ahead of the US and Japan.The Baltic Fleet, re-organized into the Second Pacific Squadron and the Third Pacific Squadron, took a prominent part in the Russo-Japanese War. After the defeat of earlier Siberian Military Flotilla vessels, in September 1904, the Second Squadron under the command of Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky was sent on a high-speed dash around South Africa.
They stopped in French, German and Portuguese colonial ports: Tangier in Morocco, Dakar in Senegal, Gabon, Baía dos Tigres, Lüderitz Bay, and Nossi Be. They then formed a single fleet under the command of Rozhestvensky with the Third Pacific Fleet, across the Indian Ocean to Cam Ranh Bay in French Indochina and then northward to its doomed encounter with the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Tsushima off the east coast of Korea in May, 1905, ending the Russo-Japanese War.
The Imperial German civilian passenger Hamburg-Amerika Line provided 60 colliers to supply the Baltic Fleet on its journey. During its passage through the North Sea the fleet mistook a fleet of British fishing boats for Japanese torpedo boats and opened fire, killing three sailors in what is known as the Dogger Bank incident. They also cut the underwater telegraph wire.
The decision to send the fleet to the Pacific was made after Russia had suffered a string of naval defeats in the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan off the coast of China and Korea near its Far East naval base and colony, at the hands of the newly emergent Imperial Japanese Navy and Army in Manchuria. The one-sided outcome of the Tsushima naval battle broke Russian strength in East Asia. It set the stage for the uprising in the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905. That propelled the decline that would see the Romanov dynasty monarchy eventually brought down with the strains of World War I, in the Russian Revolutions of 1917.
World War I
Following the catastrophic losses in battleships during the Russo-Japanese War, Russia embarked on a new naval building program which was to incorporate a number of the most modern dreadnought-type battleships into the fleet along with other vessels and practices adopted from the Western navies. In late 1914, four dreadnoughts of the Gangut class entered service with the fleet: ; ; ; and. Four more powerful battlecruisers of the Borodino class were under construction, but were never completed. On the whole the heavy units of the fleet remained in port during the war, as the Imperial German Navy's superiority in battleships and other vessels was overwhelming and it was difficult to communicate with Great Britain's Royal Navy forces further west in the North Sea even though they had the Germans bottled up after the Battle of Jutland in 1916.The Imperial Russian Navy's Baltic Fleet included a submarine division that had about 30 submarines of several classes and various auxiliary vessels, the largest of which were the transport and mother ships Europa, Tosno, Khabarovsk, Oland and Svjatitel Nikolai. Some of the fleet's 355-ton submarines were made by Electric Boat Company of Groton, Connecticut in the United States, main supplier and builder of subs for the U.S. Navy. Five of these "AG " class submarines were prefabricated by the British Pacific Engineering & Construction Company at Barnet, in Canada's British Columbia, also under contract to the Electric Boat Company. These Canadian-built subs were shipped to Russia, a fellow Ally in the First World War in December 1915.,
Four of these submarines, AG 11, AG 12, AG 15 and AG 16 were scuttled in the harbour of Hanko on 3 April 1918, just before the 10,000-strong Imperial German Baltic Sea Division landed in support of the White Guard in the Finnish Civil War. During the war the fleet was aided by a detachment of British Royal Navy submarines. These subs were later scuttled by their crews near the Harmaja Lighthouse outside Helsinki, Finland, on 4 April 1918.