Russian ironclad Petr Veliky

An 1893 lithograph of Petr Veliky
History
Russian Empire
Name Petr Velikiy
NamesakePeter the Great
OperatorImperial Russian Navy
BuilderGalerniy Island Shipyard, Saint Petersburg
Costover 5.5 million rubles
Laid down23 July 1870[Note 1]
Launched27 August 1872
Decommissioned21 May 1921
In service14 October 1876
Renamed
  • Blokshiv Nr. 1, 4 December 1923
  • Blokshiv Nr. 4, 1 January 1932
  • BSh-3, 16 May 1949
Reclassified
Stricken18 April 1959
FateScrapped after April 1959
General characteristics (as built)
TypeTurret ship
Displacement10,406 long tons (10,573 t)
Length333 ft 8 in (101.7 m)
Beam63 ft (19.2 m)
Draft24 ft 9 in (7.5 m) (designed)
Installed power
Propulsion2 shafts; 2 horizontal-return, connecting rod-steam engines
Speedabout 13 knots (24 km/h; 15 mph)
Range2,900 nautical miles (5,400 km; 3,300 mi) at 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph)
Complement24 officers and 417 crewmen
Armament
Armor

Petr Velikiy (Russian: Пётр ВеликийPeter the Great) was an ironclad turret ship built for the Imperial Russian Navy during the 1870s. Her engines and boilers were defective, but were not replaced until 1881. The ship made a cruise to the Mediterranean after they were installed, and before returning to the Baltic Fleet, where she remained for the rest of her career. She did not, like the rest of the Baltic Fleet, participate in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Petr Veliky was deemed obsolete by the late 1890s, but she was not ordered to be converted into a gunnery training ship until 1903.

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 slowed her reconstruction, and the ship was not completed until 1908. She spent most of World War I as a training ship, although she became a depot ship for submarines in 1917. Petr Veliky was in Helsinki in March 1918 when the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk required the Soviets to evacuate their naval base at Helsinki or have their ships interned by newly independent Finland even though the Gulf of Finland was still frozen over. The ship reached Kronstadt in April 1918 and was hulked on 21 May 1921. She remained in service with the Soviets, in various secondary roles, until she was finally stricken from the Navy List in 1959 and subsequently scrapped.
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