Although Russia’s Naval General Staff (Morskoi general’nyi shtab, here abbreviated NGS) has received some attention in the west,¹ two historical mysteries regarding its role in Russian defense policy remain unanswered. First, why did Russia’s legislature, the State Duma (Gosudarstvennaia Duma), which had staunchly opposed spending on a high-seas battle fleet, suddenly reverse itself in 1912 and authorize an enormous naval construction program for the Baltic Fleet? Second, why did the Russian navy, confronted in the Baltic by a far superior German fleet, nevertheless plan to send the bulk of its modern warships to the Mediterranean? As Professor Paul Halpern observed, “The question naturally arises whether the Russians really would have risked their best units far from the Baltic.”² As it turns out, both these questions are inextricably linked, and the Naval General Staff’s conception of naval power forms the basis for answering them.

I. The Creation of the Naval General Staff

The founding of the Naval General Staff was one of the many reforms enacted in the wake of the disastrous war with Japan and the upsurge of revolutionary violence in 1905. At the highest level, Emperor Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto, by which he reluctantly promised to establish an elected legislature, the State Duma. This inaugurated what one historian has called Russia’s “demi-semi-quasi constitutional monarchy.”³ However, the emperor would continue to appoint the government’s ministers, and by a revision of the Fundamental Laws, which served as Russia’s basic legal framework, foreign policy and military and naval affairs were reserved for the emperor alone; the State Duma’s only authority over the armed forces consisted of its right to approve or reject their budgets and to question the service ministers on matters relating to their budget requests.

If the Duma represented reform at the highest level of government, the founding of the Naval General Staff represented reform in the more limited context of the Naval Ministry. The war with Japan in 1904–1905 had revealed the navy’s many weaknesses—in particular, that it lacked both a plan for fighting a war in the Far East and the facilities needed to support a fleet there.⁴ These failings culminated in the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, which was not merely a disaster, but a humiliation as well.

This humiliation led one young reform-minded naval officer, Lieutenant A. N. Shcheglov, to write a long memorandum entitled “The Importance and Work of a Naval General Staff on the Basis of the Experience of the Russo-Japanese War.”⁵  After some bureaucratic maneuvering, Shcheglov’s memo was brought to the attention of the emperor, who endorsed the concept, and on 7 May 1906 the Naval General Staff came into existence.⁶ The task of the NGS, as specified in the emperor’s rescript, was defined as “the composition of a plan for war at sea and measures for the organization of the combat readiness of the maritime armed forces of the empire.”⁷ To accomplish these goals the NGS would work with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to establish who were Russia’s potential enemies, and its chief was appointed to the Council on State Defense to help formulate overall defense policy. The staff would work directly with its army counterpart to coordinate war plans for the various theaters, gather intelligence on foreign powers, and determine where naval bases should be sited as well as what facilities they should provide. Based on these factors, it would establish what sorts of ships the navy needed, and in what numbers, which would then form the basis for shipbuilding programs, cruising schedules and training.⁸

This was an impressive, not to say daunting, set of responsibilities, especially considering that, as originally constituted, the NGS was staffed by only fifteen officers (see the appendix for their names and responsibilities). Its first chief, Captain 1st Rank Lev Alekseevich Brusilov (younger brother of the famous General Aleksei Alekseevich Brusilov), recognized the staff’s limitations, and established a regime under which its work was done in cooperation with other branches of the navy; for example, war plans were formulated jointly by the NGS and the fleet staffs. Nor was the NGS intended to be the navy’s operational headquarters in wartime: that role lay with the fleet commanders. The task of the NGS was to place in the hands of those fleet commanders the forces and resources they would need to conduct a successful war.

In addition to the small size of the staff, it was initially hindered by the relatively low seniority of its members—Brusilov was a captain sitting beside admirals in conferences, and most of the staff were captains 2nd rank (i.e., commanders) and lieutenants. Another handicap was the sometimes excessive confidence of some of its officers. Admiral I. K. Grigorovich, who, as naval minister from 1911 to 1917, would develop a deep appreciation for the virtues of the NGS, nevertheless noted in 1910 that the “young, less experienced officers of the Naval General Staff… thought too much of themselves.”⁹

II. The Navy and the Duma

During the first years after the Russo-Japanese War, the Duma and the Naval Ministry did not get along well. At issue was the reconstruction of the Baltic Fleet. Russia’s economy had been badly disrupted by the war with Japan and the suppression of revolutionary disturbances, so the majority of Duma deputies wanted to cut spending on the navy in order to devote as much money as possible to reequipping the army. Not surprisingly, the army agreed, as did the Ministry of Finances.¹⁰ These institutions pressed for an inexpensive and purely defensive force in the Baltic made up of torpedo boats and submarines.

‘Despite elaborate mine defenses and a strong force of destroyers and torpedo boats, the Baltic Fleet was unable to stop the “enemy,” envisioned as a combined German-Swedish naval force, from carrying out amphibious landings in the rear of the Russian army’s front line.’

The NGS argued that even a purely defensive Baltic Fleet had to be built around a core of modern battleships, and the 1910 maneuvers supported this view.¹¹ Despite elaborate mine defenses and a strong force of destroyers and torpedo boats, the Baltic Fleet was unable to stop the “enemy,” envisioned as a combined German-Swedish naval force, from carrying out amphibious landings in the rear of the Russian army’s front line.¹² In fact the fleet could not even delay the enemy for the twelve-to-fourteen days that it would take the army to mobilize for the defense of St. Petersburg. Although the navy was strongly supported by the emperor, the opponents of increased naval spending managed to block funding for any new battleships in 1908, 1909 and 1910, although in 1909 the navy did manage to lay down four Baltic dreadnoughts thanks to a loophole in the budget laws.¹³

The debate over what sort of fleet to build would continue for several years, and by the summer of 1910 the situation had reached an impasse.¹⁴ The Duma was determined to prevent the funding for battleships, but without battleships, the defenses devised by the NGS were incapable of stopping an enemy fleet from winning control of the Baltic Sea and threatening the capital. Yet by 1912 this impasse had been decisively broken when, to the great surprise of many contemporary observers, the Duma willingly funded an enormous shipbuilding program of Baltic capital ships. Even more surprisingly, the navy’s leadership was so confident of its defenses that it planned to send the bulk of the new dreadnoughts of the Baltic Fleet to the Mediterranean. Historians have been puzzled by this turn of events, one even suggesting that the Russian naval leadership had “lost touch with reality.”¹⁵ The fact was, however, that political, economic and naval realities were the foundation for these changes.

The first inkling of the coming changes came in a revised assessment of Britain’s commitment to the Franco-Russian alliance. Until 1910, all of the naval war plans had assumed that Britain would remain neutral in the event of a general European war, and there was even some residual fear that Britain might be an enemy.¹⁶ But in an analysis dating to late 1910, the NGS took note of the recent intensification of the Anglo-German naval rivalry, as well as Britain’s firm anti-German position in the various crises that plagued the era. This led the NGS to believe that Britain would indeed come into the war as an ally of France and Russia. Faced with the British threat in the North Sea, Germany would be able to send only “second-class forces” against Russia, and as a result, “the relative weight of our naval forces in the Baltic Sea is changed considerably to our advantage.”¹⁷ About a year later the Russian army came to a similar conclusion regarding Britain’s likelihood of entering a future war against Germany.¹⁸

Another factor leading to an improved outlook for the Russian navy in the Baltic was the start of construction of the “Maritime Fortress of the Emperor Peter the Great” (Morskaia krepost’ Imperatora Petra Velikogo). This was to be a complex of coast batteries embracing not only the entrance to the Gulf of Finland but also the Estonian port of Reval (today Tallinn), which was to be greatly expanded and become the Baltic Fleet’s main base.¹⁹ Construction began in 1912, and the entire complex was slated for completion in 1916, when it was to incorporate no fewer than twenty 14-inch guns, four 12-inch guns, eight 8-inch guns and a variety of lesser calibers. These guns, supplemented by the existing force of modernized predreadnought battleships, would cover deep minefields, creating a huge “mine-artillery position” (minno-artilleriiskaia pozitsiia) that would present a formidable obstacle to an enemy force trying to penetrate into the Gulf of Finland. To the NGS, it seemed that this fortress complex, combined with the downgrading of the German threat, would provide an adequate defense in the Baltic.

 

Meanwhile, a new danger was forcing the Duma to reevaluate its anti-battleship stance. Here economics was the key factor. By 1910, Russia was finally emerging from its post-war recession; its war debts had been paid off, the empire’s balance of trade was favorable, and the first signs of an industrial boom were becoming apparent.²⁰ But this rosy prospect was dependent upon the export of southern Russia’s grain through the Turkish Straits—that is, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. It was Russia’s grain exports from the Black Sea that paid for the manufactured goods that flowed into the empire through the Baltic.²¹ The Duma’s members were well-aware of this; more than 40% of the deputies were substantial landowners.²² Other members derived a portion of their wealth, directly or indirectly, from the grain trade.

The Duma therefore found it disquieting in 1909–1910 when rumors began reaching St. Petersburg that Constantinople was shopping for dreadnoughts.²³ These rumors were confirmed when the Turkish government ordered two dreadnoughts from British shipyards in the summer of 1911.²⁴ Countering this development created a particularly thorny problem. International agreements permitted only Turkish warships to pass through the Straits in peacetime, so any new construction program for the Black Sea Fleet had to rely on Russia’s own Black Sea shipyards, which were notorious for their long building times. In November 1913 the minister of foreign affairs estimated that, if Turkey ordered dreadnoughts in Britain or Germany, they would be ready in two years, whereas ships built in Russia would take three years, although a more realistic ratio would have been three years for British- or German-built ships versus four years for a Russian-built one.²⁵ In either case, the situation was only too clear: if Turkey purchased battleships abroad, they would arrive before Russia could build matching ships in the Black Sea. And if Turkey chose to use its newfound naval superiority to close the Straits to Russian exports, there would be little that Russia could do about it.

This was a deeply disturbing scenario to many of Russia’s leaders, both in the government and the Duma. Nor were these worries restricted to the nationalists of the center and right-wing parties; even some liberals, who believed that economic development was the key to political reform, saw their hopes endangered if Turkey dominated the Black Sea.

Oddly, the one organization in St. Petersburg that seemed unconcerned by the rumors of Turkish naval plans was the navy. As the then-chief of the NGS, Admiral A. A. Ebergard, wrote, “If, in addition to the Baltic dreadnoughts [of the Sevastopol class], we have the funds for a few more ships of this type, they should be built in the Baltic and not in the Black Sea.”²⁶ One historian has suggested this was a sign that the navy was trying “to shirk responsibility for coping with the Turks,”²⁷ but from the Naval General Staff’s perspective the Black Sea was simply the wrong place to build battleships. The navy’s ultimate goal was a “free-ranging naval force” (svobodnaia morskaia sila), that is, a high-seas fleet that would be unconstrained by defensive tasks, free to go wherever in the world Russia’s interests required.²⁸ Battleships locked up in the Black Sea by international treaty obviously could not form such a force. This concept had first been broached in December 1906 in discussions with the army’s General Staff, during which the naval representatives noted that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was due to expire in 1915, at which time it might be of “urgent necessity to have… a free-ranging naval force able to move to the Far East.”²⁹ This need was again stressed in a March 1907 paper submitted by the naval minister to P. A. Stolypin, the prime minister, entitled “The Strategic Basis for the Plan of War at Sea” (Strategicheskie osnovaniia dlia plana voina na more), in which the tasks of the Baltic Fleet were defined not only as the defense of the Gulf of Finland, but also as providing “a free-ranging naval force for supporting the interests of the empire in foreign [vneshnikh] waters.”³⁰ While defense of the Gulf of Finland would be entrusted to torpedo craft, the “free-ranging” force would have to be built around a core of modern battleships. Foreign Minister A. P. Izvolskii, who was determined to rebuild Russian prestige after the war with Japan, supported the navy: “This fleet should be free-ranging, not constrained by the particular tasks of defending this or that sea or gulf, [but] should operate wherever policy indicates.”³¹

The NGS continued to advocate for such a force, submitting a memorandum on this subject to the naval minister in May 1911. In this document the staff wrote:

All attempts to replace a free-ranging naval force… have been unsuccessful to this day—this has been realized by all the nations of the world, despite their differences in interests, international and geographical position…. Only a strong battle fleet, capable of going out to the open sea, finding the enemy and fighting a successful battle, can satisfy the requirements of the security of the state both in relation to its political interests and in terms of territorial security.³²

Thus, in the eyes of the NGS, battleships for the Black Sea Fleet would siphon funding away from the essential free-ranging naval force. However, with Turkey apparently poised to gain control of the Black Sea, in August 1910 an exasperated Stolypin wrote to Naval Minister Admiral S. A. Voevodskii in an imperative tone:

…the Russian Government… cannot remain a spectator to such a significant strengthening of Turkey’s naval power, which reduces us to a subordinate position and even a dangerous one for our whole Black Sea coast. Obviously, it is necessary for us to set to work most urgently on measures which can equalize our military position on the Black Sea with the projected growth of the Turkish fleet.³³

Reluctantly spurred to action, the NGS drew up a shipbuilding program for the Black Sea Fleet that included three dreadnoughts.³⁴ The program was quickly approved by the Council of Ministers, the emperor, and, in May 1911, by the Duma. Its passage was certainly smoothed by improved relations between the legislature and the Naval Ministry, which was now under a new minister, Admiral I. K. Grigorovich, “a vigorous leader … who soon won the Duma’s high regard.”³⁵Despite the legislature’s growing esteem for Grigorovich, however, it was the threat of Turkish naval superiority in the Black Sea that ensured the passage of the measure.³⁶

Events soon validated Russian concerns for its grain trade. The Italo-Turkish War (September 1911 to October 1912) caused two interruptions in Russian grain exports, including a halt of several weeks in April–May 1912 that caused large-scale economic disruption.³⁷ After these events the Duma needed no further convincing of the need for a strong battle fleet in the Black Sea.

The NGS, however, still hankered for its “free-ranging naval force.” By this time the idea had become the foundation of the navy’s Baltic Fleet construction program, which was endorsed by Naval Minister Grigorovich, approved by the emperor and proposed to the Duma in March 1912. It included four powerful 32,000-ton battlecruisers, four light cruisers, 36 destroyers and twelve submarines, with a price tag of more than four hundred million rubles, to be spread over five years.³⁸ This was intended as the first installment of a twenty-year “Law on the Imperial Russian Fleet” (Zakon ob Imperatorskom rossiiskim flote) modeled on Tirpitz’s successful legislative program in Germany; it envisioned a Baltic Fleet of no fewer than thirty capital ships by 1930, as well as a force of fifteen battleships in the Black Sea.³⁹

‘To ensure that there would never be a repeat of the Baltic Fleet’s tragic journey to Tsushima, the “Northern Sea Route” across the top of Siberia would be developed, and starting in 1910 several expeditions were dispatched to explore the route.’

This gigantic fleet would provide for defense in the Baltic, help Russia fulfill its ancient goal of gaining control of the Turkish Straits, and secure the nation’s Far Eastern territories. To ensure that there would never be a repeat of the Baltic Fleet’s tragic journey to Tsushima, the “Northern Sea Route” across the top of Siberia would be developed, and starting in 1910 several expeditions were dispatched to explore the route.⁴⁰ One sign of these ambitions was the fact that all Russian dreadnoughts and cruisers, even those being built for the Black Sea, were fitted with icebreaking bows.

The problem was convincing the Duma to vote for an expensive program of capital ship construction for the Baltic, rather than the Black Sea. Grigorovich was an astute politician, and he realized that in the NGS he had a powerful tool not only for drawing up war plans and shipbuilding programs, but for lobbying the Duma as well. As one historian has noted, the NGS officers provided “effective propaganda” for the navy.⁴¹ That propaganda was directed toward one goal: to educate the Duma deputies—who were notoriously ignorant of military affairs⁴² —on the importance of sea power. P. N. Miliukov, one of the leaders of the liberal (and oppositionist) Kadet party, acknowledged the role of the NGS, noting how its “young naval officers came directly to us with reports on the necessity of strengthening the navy.”⁴³

The keynote of the Naval General Staff’s campaign for the new shipbuilding program was laid out in an “explanatory memorandum” that accompanied the bill; after outlining the navy’s historic role in expanding the Russian empire, the memo went on to point out that

[i]t must be kept in mind that the majority of issues connected with the Black Sea and the Near East [a term that then included the Balkan Peninsula] will be determined in the Baltic theater…. The support of our historic interests in the Near East at the current time depends to a considerable degree on our naval power in the Baltic Sea.⁴⁴

The lobbying efforts of the NGS proved remarkably successful: the Duma approved the measure on 19 June 1912 by an overwhelming majority of 228 votes in favor versus 71 against.⁴⁵ Certainly, the explanatory memo’s explicit linkage of the Baltic Fleet to the Near Eastern question played an important role in that success.

However, a noteworthy feature of the memorandum is that it did not specify exactly how the “issues connected with the Black Sea and the Near East” would be “determined in the Baltic theater,” whether by generally reinforcing Russia’s position as a great power, or by some form of direct intervention. That ambiguity may well have been deliberate, a ploy to avoid alarming the Duma with the prospect of risky adventures in distant seas. But that was precisely what the NGS was planning. As the staff noted in a report to Admiral Grigorovich dated 7 November 1913,

it would be irrational to build a fleet for sums exceeding a billion rubles merely for the protection of the coasts of the Gulf of Finland against a landing by two German corps, a landing that is very problematic from the point of view of serious strategic calculations.⁴⁶

The NGS had already determined a far more “rational” prospective theater of operations for the free-ranging naval force that had been approved by the Duma. In July 1912—only a few weeks after the Baltic shipbuilding program had been approved—Admiral Prince A. A. Liven, the new chief of the NGS, requested French approval for basing ships from the Baltic Fleet at Bizerte, Tunisia, at some indeterminate time in the future, an intention confirmed by Liven’s successor, Admiral A. I. Rusin, in June 1914.⁴⁷ Rusin mentioned that the Russian force might include 30,000-ton, 28-knot “battleships”—characteristics matching those of the Baltic Fleet’s Izmail class battlecruisers, which had been laid down under the 1912 program.

While the NGS planned its grandiose schemes, the political status of the Turkish Straits remained unsettled. In late 1913 the appointment of German general Limon von Sanders to command the Turkish First Corps, based near Constantinople, led to yet another crisis.xlviii The thought of a German commanding the troops stationed closest to the Turkish capital and the Bosphorus was extremely disconcerting. In response Naval Minister Grigorovich considered sending all four of the Baltic Fleet’s Sevastopol-class dreadnoughts to the Mediterranean upon their completion, placing them “at the disposal” of the Black Sea Fleet’s commander.⁴⁸ This was in line with an NGS proposal made in November, which recommended that

…as the guiding idea of all our military-naval preparations in the near future, the general strategic concept [should be] the preparation of our Baltic and Black Sea fleets for operations not only in defense of our coasts, but also for active joint operations in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, in order to secure in any circumstances Russia’s maritime route from the Black [Sea] to the Aegean Sea.⁴⁹

The report went on to state that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs insisted

…on the concentration of all our military-naval forces in the Black [Sea] and Mediterranean Sea, since this would give Russia a weightier voice in the final resolution of the “Eastern Question” [that is, the status of the Ottoman Empire, and in particular of the Turkish Straits].⁵⁰

This report, which Grigorovich approved, formed the basis for a document presented to the emperor in December 1913. This envisioned creating naval forces capable of “obtaining mastery of the sea in the Constantinople Channel [i.e., the Turkish Straits] and the waters adjacent to them” by 1919.⁵¹ According to the NGS, this would require not only a Black Sea Fleet of eight dreadnoughts, but also the dispatch to the Mediterranean of the entire projected dreadnought strength of the Baltic Fleet—four Sevastopol class battleships then completing, four Izmail class battlecruisers then under construction, and a further brigade of four battleships yet to be laid down.⁵² The emperor approved the report on 12 January 1914.

‘A powerful Russian squadron in the Eastern Mediterranean could in peacetime be used to coerce the Turks into policies favorable to Russia. And in the event of a general war, the same squadron could be used as a lever to achieve Russia’s ultimate aim in the region—possession of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.’

There remained the crucial question of where to base these ships; although base rights at Bizerte had already been obtained from the French, this port was a long way from the Dardanelles. Therefore, the Russians started pressing the British for a naval convention, hoping to obtain “an agreement for our vessels to use English ports in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea as bases.”⁵³ A powerful Russian squadron in the Eastern Mediterranean could in peacetime be used to coerce the Turks into policies favorable to Russia. And in the event of a general war, the same squadron could be used as a lever to achieve Russia’s ultimate aim in the region—possession of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.

III. Conclusion

To summarize, the NGS assumed that the Germans would have to concentrate the bulk of their naval forces in the North Sea to face the British, leaving only second-line units for the Baltic. Therefore, the maritime defense of St. Petersburg could be entrusted to minefields guarded by the heavy guns of the fortress complex then under construction and pre-dreadnought battleships. The modern capital ships of the Baltic Fleet could therefore form the long-desired “free-ranging naval force” that could be sent wherever imperial policy demanded—most immediately, to the Mediterranean, where it would help ensure Russia’s freedom of trade through the Turkish Straits.⁵⁴ The NGS was able to convince the Duma, many of whose members’ livelihoods were dependent on that trade, to approve the massive Baltic shipbuilding program by linking it explicitly to the resolution of Russia’s goals in the Turkish Straits.

The onset of the First World War led to the collapse of the Naval General Staff’s grand plans for a high-seas fleet of powerful dreadnoughts—and ultimately to the collapse of the Russian empire itself. This put an end to an interesting experiment that found two of imperial Russia’s reforming institutions—the Naval General Staff and Russia’s first elected legislature, the State Duma—moving from antagonism to cooperation. V. N. Kokovtsov, prime minister in 1912 when the Baltic Fleet construction program was passed, observed how

[t]hese young officers [of the NGS] speedily won for themselves and the ministry they represented the favor of the Duma by their splendid work on all matters submitted to it, by intelligently defending these matters in the Duma [defense] committee, and by readily adapting themselves to the moods of the Duma and its prominent representatives in the Committee for National Defense.⁵⁵

The officers of the NGS were learning how to operate effectively in the new semi-constitutional environment, where gaining the approval of elected representatives was as important as winning the emperor’s support. In the process, both the NGS and the Duma were truly navigating uncharted waters.

—

Appendix: The Naval General Staff as constituted in May 1906l⁵⁶

Chief: Captain 1st Rank L. A. Brusilov
Deputy Chief [pomoshchnik]: Captain 2nd Rank A. V. Shtal

1st Branch (Operations):

• Baltic War Plans: Lieutenant A. N. Shcheglov (who was also responsible for the staff’s archives)
• Black Sea War Plans: Captain 2nd Rank M. I. Kaskov
• Far Eastern War Plans: Captain 2nd Rank M. M. Rimskii-Korsakov

2nd Branch (Russian Statistics*): Lieutenant A. V. Kolchak

• Baltic Theater: Lieutenant L. G. Postriganev, Staff-Captain V. M. Vavilov (who was also responsible for the internal security of the staff, as well as its ciphers)
• Black Sea Theater: Lieutenant Baron I. A. Cherkasov
• Far Eastern Theater: Lieutenant P. P. Vladislavlev

3rd Branch (Foreign Statistics): Lieutenant B. I. Dolivo-Dobrovolskii

• The navies of Germany and the Scandinavian nations: Captain 2nd Rank Baron O. O. Rikhter
• The navies of Britain and the United States: Captain 2nd Rank L. B. Kerber
• The navies of Austria-Hungary, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and smaller European states: Lieutenant M. I. Dunin-Barkovskii
• The navies of Japan, China, the United States (in the Pacific), as well as the lesser nations of the Americas: Lieutenant M. I. Smirnov

*Note: In Russian usage at this time, “statistics” did not refer merely to the collection of numerical data, but involved “…the systematic collection of information, its collation and analysis, and the dissemination and application of the resulting knowledge.”⁵⁷ In other words, intelligence. For this reason, naval attachés sent their reports to the NGS.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to my friend Sergei Vinogradov for much of the material used in the writing of this article. My wife, Jan Torbet, provided invaluable editorial assistance, as she has on so many other projects, as well as encouragement and support.

Notes

1. For example, see Evgenii F. Podsoblyaev [sic; Podsobliaev], “The Russian Naval General Staff and the Evolution of Naval Policy, 1905–1914,” Journal of Military History,  66, no. 1 (January 2002), 37–69. Note that all transliterations from Russian have been done in accordance with the Library of Congress system. Dates are given in accordance with the Gregorian calendar used in the west; at that time Russia still used the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind the Gregorian in the twentieth century. [↩]
2. Paul G. Halpern, The Mediterranean Naval Situation 1908–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 307.[↩]
3. William Gleason, “Alexander Guchkov and the End of the Russian Empire” (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 73, no. 3 (1983), 23.[↩]
4. V. D. Dotsenko, A. A. Dotsenko and V. F. Mironov, Voenno-morskaia strategiia Rossii [The Naval Strategy of Russia] (Moscow: EKSMO; St. Petersburg: Terra Fantastica, 2005), 118–122.[↩]
5. A. N. Shcheglov, Znachenie i rabota Shtaba na osnovanii opyta Russko-Iaponskoi voiny [The Importance and Work of the Staff on the Basis of the Experience of the Russo-Japanese War] (St. Petersburg: The author, 1905).[↩]
6. vi Shcheglov’s account of events can be found in A. N. Shcheglov, “Predislovie k materialam istorii Morskogo general’nogo shtaba” [Preface to Materials on the History of the Naval General Staff] (Tsitadel’, no. 1 (1998), 56–62.[↩]
7. Quoted in Dotsenko, Dotsenko and Mironov, Voenno-morskaia strategiia Rossii, 113.[↩]
8. Dotsenko, Dotsenko and Mironov, Voenno-morskaia strategiia Rossii, 123.[↩]
9. I. K. Grigorovich, Vospominaniia byvshego morskogo ministra [Memoirs of a Former Naval Minister] (St. Petersburg: Deva, 1993), 42.[↩]
10. For the conflict over funding, see John David Walz, “State Defense and Russian Politics Under the Last Tsar,” PhD diss., (Syracuse University, 1967), 17–23, 28–56. For the opposition of the Duma, army and Ministry of Finances to large-scale naval construction, see (among other works) ibid., 80–87, 111–113, 223–224; Podsoblyaev, “The Russian Naval General Staff and the Evolution of Naval Policy,” 43–44, 51–53; and Michael Perrins, “The Council for State Defence 1905–1909: A Study in Russian Bureaucratic Politics,” Slavonic and East European Review 58, no. 3 (July 1908), 370–398, 388–390. [↩]
11. A. Iu. Emelin and K. L. Koziurenok, “N.O. fon Essen, A.V. Kolchak i razrabotka programmy usilennogo sudostroeniia Baltiiskogo flota” [N.O. fon Essen, A.V. Kolchak and the Development of the Program for Reinforced Shipbuilding for the Baltic Fleet] Gangut 24 (2000), 28–46, 31–32. [↩]
12. The Russian army’s concern about enemy landings behind its front lines that would disrupt its mobilization dated back to the 1880s, although at that time the method of attack was seen as massive cavalry raids; see David Alan Rich, The Tsar’s Colonels: Professionalism, Strategy, and Subversion in Late Imperial Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 175. [↩]
13. Stephen McLaughlin, Russian and Soviet Battleships (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2003; reprint edition, 2021), 193–194.[↩]
14. For a summary of the debate, see E. F. Podsobliaev, “Kakoi flot nuzhen Russii? Po materialam diskussii, sostoiavsheisia nakanune Pervoi mirovoi voiny” [What Sort of Fleet Does Russia Need? Based on Materials of the Discussion Taking Place on the Eve of the First World War], Novyi chasovoi: Russkii voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal 4 (1996), pp. 61–65).  [↩]
15. Martyna Agata Fox, “The Eastern Question in Russian Politics: Interplay of Diplomacy, Opinion and Interest, 1905–1917” PhD diss., (Yale University, 1993), 269.[↩]
16. M. Petrov, Podgotovka Rossii k Mirovoi voine na more [The Preparations of Russia for the World War at Sea] (Moscow; Leningrad: Garsudarstvennoe voennoe izdatel’stvo, 1926), 107–108.[↩]
17. Quoted in Emelin and Koziurenok, “N. O. fon Essen, A. V. Kolchak, i razrabotka programmy usilennogo sudostroeniia Baltiiskogo flota,” 32.[↩]
18. Bruce W. Menning, “Pieces of the Puzzle: The Role of Iu. N. Danilov and M. V. Alekseev in Russian War Planning before 1914.” International History Review 25, no. 4 (December 2003]), pp. 757–798), at 790–791.[↩]
19. L. I. Amirkhanov, Morskaia krepost’ Imperatora Petra Velikogo [The Naval Fortress of Emperor Peter the Great] (St. Petersburg: Ivanov i Leshchinskii, 1995). [↩]
20. J. N. Westwood, Endurance and Endeavour: Russian History 1812–1992, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 184–185; Peter Gatrell, Government, Industry and Rearmament in Russia, 1900–1914: The Last Argument of Tsarism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 140; and S. E. Vinogradov, Poslednie ispoliny Rossiiskogo imperatorskogo flota: Lineinye korabli c 16” artilleriei v programmakh razvitiia flota 1914–1917 gg. [The Last Giants of the Russian Imperial Navy: Battleships with 16” Guns in the Programs for Developing the Navy, 1914–1917] (St. Petersburg: Galeia Print, 1999), 40–45.[↩]
21. D. W. Spring, “Russian Foreign Policy, Economic Interests and the Straits Question, 1905–1914,” in New Perspectives in Modern Russian History: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrowgate, 1990, ed. Robert B. McKean, (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd, 1992), 203–221, 210. [↩]
22. Ben Cion Pinchuk, The Octobrists in the Third Duma, 1907–1912 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), 29. Walz, “State Defense and Russian Politics Under the Last Tsar,” 38, indicates that nearly 50% of the Third Duma’s members were of the landed nobility.[↩]
23. S. E. Vinogradov, Lineinyi korabl’ “Imperatritsa Mariia”: Istoriia sozdaniia—proektirovanie—postroika—opisanie konstruktsii—boevaia sluzhba [Battleship Imperatritsa Mariia: The History of her Creation—Designing—Building—Description of her Construction—Combat service] (St. Petersburg: Galeiia-Print, 2002), 11–17.[↩]
24. Halpern, The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 317.[↩]
25. See Ia. M. Zakher, “Konstantinopol’ i prolivy (ocherki iz istorii diplomatii nakanune mirovoi voiny)” [Constantinople and the Straits: Studies from the History of Diplomacy on the Eve of the World War], Krasnyi  arkhiv. Istoricheskii zhurnal; Part 1: vol. 6 [1924], pp. 48–76; part 2: vol. 7 [1924], pp. 32–54), part 2, 32.[↩]
26. Quoted in Anatolii Vsevolodovich Shmelev, “A. V. Kolchak i vozrozhdenie russkogo flota, 1906–1911 gody” [A. V. Kolchak and the Rebirth of the Russian Navy, 1906–1911], Voprosy istorii, 1997, no. 11, pp. 143–148), 146.[↩]
27. Ronald Park Bobroff, Roads to Glory: Late Imperial Russia and the Turkish Straits (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 18.[↩]
28. Petrov, Pogotovka Rossii k Mirovoi voine na more, 114; Podsoblyaev, “The Russian Naval General Staff and the Evolution of Naval Policy,” 43.[↩]
29. Quoted in K. F.  Shatsillo, Russkii imperializm i razvitie flota nakanune Pervoi mirovoi voiny (1906–1914 gg.) [Russian Imperialism and the Development of the Fleet on the Eve of the First World War (1906–1914)] (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), 56, 57 n.47.[↩]
30. Quoted in I. D. Spasskii, ed., Istoriia otechestvennogo sudostroeniia vol. 3: Sudostroenie v nachale XX vv. (St. Petersburg: Sudostroenie, 1995), 23.[↩]
31. Quoted in Shatsillo, Russkii imperializm i razvitie flota, 59–60.[↩]
32. Quoted in Quoted in Vinogradov, Poslednie ispoliny Rossiiskogo imperatorskogo flota, 31.[↩]
33. Bobroff, Roads to Glory, 18.[↩]
34. Vinogradov, Lineinyi korabl’ “Imperatritsa Mariia,” 6–7.[↩]
35. Walz, “State Defense and Russian Politics Under the Last Tsar,” 89–91, 225.[↩]
36. Walz, “State Defense and Russian Politics Under the Last Tsar,” 225.[↩]
37. Spring, “Russian Foreign Policy, Economic Interests and the Straits Question,” 211–214; C. Jay Smith, The Russian Struggle for Power: 1914–1917: A Study of Russian Foreign Policy During the First World War (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 64; Bobroff, Roads to Glory, 32.[↩]
38. Petrov, Podgotovka Rossii k Mirovoi voine na more, 140, 148, 151; K. F. Shatsillo, Ot Portsmutskogo mira k Pervoi mirovoi voine: Generaly i politika [From the Portsmouth Peace to the First World War: Generals and Policy] (Moscow: Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia [ROSSPEN], 2000), Table No. 2, 355. [↩]
39. Vinogradov, Poslednie ispoliny Rossiiskogo imperatorskogo flota, 31–37.[↩]
40. For these expeditions, see L. M. Starokadomskiy, Charting the Russian Northern Sea Route: The Arctic Ocean Hydrographic Expedition 1910–1915, translated and edited by William Barr (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976).[↩]
41. Walz, “State Defense and Russian Politics Under the Last Tsar,” 226.[↩]
42. William C. Fuller Jr., Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia 1881–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 230.[↩]
43. Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov, Political Memoirs, 1905–1917 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 215.[↩]
44. Reproduced in A. E. Savinkin, ed., Voenno-morskaia ideia Rossii: Dukhovnoe nasledie Imperatorskogo flota [The Naval Idea of Russia: The Spiritual Legacy of the Imperial Navy] (2nd edition, corrected and expanded; Moscow: Russkii put’, 1999), 208–209. A complete translation of the 1912 naval program’s “explanatory memorandum,” which differs slightly from my translation, can be found in the report of the British naval attaché in St. Petersburg, Captain Grenfell, dated 22 June 1912 (The National Archives, Kew, London, FO 371/1470, ff. 40–42; this is also available in Kenneth Bourne and D. Cameron Watt, eds., British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, Part I: From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the First World War, series A: Russia, 1859–1914, edited by Dominic Lieven; vol. 6: Russia, 1910–1914 (n.p.: University Publications of America, Inc., 1983), 248–250. [↩]
45. Halpern, The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 298.[↩]
46. Liven to Grigorovich, 7/21 November 1913, quoted in Zakher, “Konstantinopol’ i prolivy,” part 1, 67.[↩]
47. Halpern, Mediterranean Naval Situation, 307–308. [↩]
48. A. Iu Emelin, and K. L. Koziurenok, eds., “‘Sostoianie Baltiiskogo flota vyzyvaet ser’eznye opaseniia…’” [“The Condition of the Baltic Fleet Arouses Serious Apprehensions…”] (Gangut, no. 17 (1998), pp. 51–58), 51–52. [↩]
49. Quoted in Zakher, “Konstantinopol’ i prolivy,” part 1, 68.[↩]
50. Quoted in Zakher, “Konstantinopol’ i prolivy,” part 1, 69.[↩]
51. Extracts from this report can be found in Zakher, “Konstantinopol’ i prolivy,” part 2, 7, 35–37. See also Shatsillo, Russkii imperializm i razvitie flota, 157–158, and Vinogradov, Poslednie ispoliny Rossiiskogo imperatorskogo flota, 37–38.[↩]
52. In Russian naval terminology, a “brigade” consisted of four capital ships or cruisers.[↩]
53. Minutes of a joint conference of the Naval General Staff and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 13/26 May 1914, reproduced in M. N. Pokrovskii, ed., Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia v epokhu imperializma: Dokumenty iz arkhivov tsarskogo i vremennogo pravitel’stv 1878–1917 gg. [International Relations in the Epoch of Imperialism: Documents from the Archives of the Tsarist and Provisional Governments], series III, volume 3 (14 May–27 June 1914 g.) [14 May–27 June 1914] (Moscow/Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1933), 98–99; quote from 99.[↩]
54. Vinogradov, Poslednie ispoliny Rossiiskogo imperatorskogo flota, 218.[↩]
55. V. N. Kokovtsov, Out of My Past: The Memoirs of Count Kokovtsov Hoover War Library Publications 6, edited by H. H. Fisher; translated by Laura Matveev, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1935), 219.[↩]
56. K. B. Nazarenko, Morskoe ministerstvo Rossii. 1906–1914 [The Naval Ministry of Russia, 1906–1914] (St. Petersburg: Gangut, 2010), 51–52, 55–64.[↩]
57. David Alan Rich, “Building Foundations for Effective Intelligence: Military Geography and Statistics in Russian Perspective, 1845–1905,” in: David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Bruce W. Menning, eds., Reforming the Tsar’s Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution; Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 168–185), 173. [↩]