Russian Ironclad Petr Veliky

Russian Ironclad Petr Veliky

Petr Velikiy (Russian: Пётр Великий – Peter 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 1904–05 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 Helskini 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.