Imperial Russian Navy Research Articles

Деятельность судовых священников по организации библиотек на кораблях Российского императорского флота на рубеже XIX-XX вв.

The activity of the navy chaplains outside the framework of worship is still a little-studied aspect of the service of the Orthodox clergy in the navy. This article attempts, based on the analysis of various written sources, to reconstruct the activities of representatives of the naval clergy in organizing libraries on the ships of the Russian Imperial Navy in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. This is one of the least studied areas of ministry of navy chaplains. The authors, relying on personal sources, office materials and periodicals, analyze the existing practice in the fleet of creating and completing ship libraries, their types and features of functioning, and also determine the role of navy chaplains in these processes. It is important to note that many sources are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The authors came to the conclusion that, despite the frequent lack of initiative on the part of the officers or even with a certain opposition, the navy chaplains were directly related to the organization of both church and sailor's libraries. Some clerics acted quite effectively in this field, but they could not significantly change the general situation that had developed with librarianship on the ships of the Russian Imperial Navy.

Chaplains in the Imperial Russian Navy, 1890–1914

Naval chaplains in the Imperial Russian Navy faced particular difficulties at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They initially had little training and were not paid as part of the naval establishment. They were therefore treated with condescension or contempt and it proved difficult to recruit chaplains to the naval service. Despite their low status within the navy, many served with distinction in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. New regulations came into force in 1908 that required chaplains to monitor the political as well as religious well-being of the crew following the revolutionary events of 1905–7. Reforms to the naval chaplaincy in 1911–12 saw a professionalization of the service and an influx of clergy who were educated. Despite this their status and influence remained limited, and they were unable to combat anti-government sentiment resulting in the sailors becoming the ‘vanguard of the revolution’ in 1917. This article provides an insight into the chaplaincy service of the Imperial Russian Navy at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Medical Geography and Civil Society in the Russian Empire

In the intellectual construction of empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one of the principal building blocks was medical geography. A discipline located at the boundary of medicine, ethnography, sociology, and geography, medical geography devoted itself to understanding the social and environmental factors that neo-Hippocratic medicine thought determined public health. Thanks to A History of Medicine and Medical Geography in the Russian Empire, co-written by a team of researchers under the direction of E. Vishlenkova and A. Renner, there exists for the first time a study of the role played by medical geography in the development of the Russian Empire. The book begins by discussing what it calls the infrastructure of Russian medico-geographic research: the top-level medical agencies, the system of Baltic maritime quarantines, the training and career paths of physicians, and the development of medical associations. Then it examines the findings of medico-geographic researchers, discussing the climate theories of early modern European medical thinkers and the development in Russia of the three principal forms of medico-geographic writing — statistics, mapmaking, and narrative “medico-topographical descriptions”. The final section offers a series of casestudies from spaces as diverse as Lithuania, the Kazakh steppe, the Arctic shipping route, and global voyages of the vessels of the imperial Russian navy. Systematically placing Russia in the comparative framework of European empires and alternating in its perspective between St Petersburg and distant frontiers, the book explores how medical geography and its practitioners connected Russia with Europe and helped simultaneously to form the imperial state, the Russian nation, and a nascent civil society.

Assistance of Peasants to the Russian Imperial Navy During the Crimean War

Assistance of Peasants to the Russian Imperial Navy During the Crimean War

“CONFESSION” BY P. A. VYAZEMSKY IN THE LITERARY ALMANAC OF THE QUEEN OF THE HELLENES OLGA (COPY OF A. I. KHOMUTOV)

The article describes a little-known archival source – the album of the Vice-Admiral of the Russian Imperial Navy A. I. Khomutov. It was presented to the owner by the Queen of the Hellenes Olga (Grand Duchess Olga Konstantinovna). The article traces the history of the album, suggests its dating, analyzes the notes made by the hand of the Grand Duchess, and describes the unique genre structure of the album-almanac. Special attention is paid to the circumstances of the appearance in A. I. Khomutov’s copy of lines from the poem by Prince P. A. Vyazemsky “Confession” in 1867, written by the hand of the Queen. The autographs included in the almanac were not previously an object of study, neither was the almanac itself, which is little known to researchers. The intersection of names, dates, poetic images and events allows us to consider the almanac not only as a rare factual source, but also as an artifact of multi-level interpretation. The article reveals the symbolism of the biographical notes, the confessional lines of Prince Vyazemsky (“There are days when the noises of life are silent around...”, 1867), the mystical circumstances of the appearance of his “Confession”.

Homosexuality in the Late Imperial Russian Navy: A Microhistory

Homosexuality in the Late Imperial Russian NavyA Microhistory Irina Roldugina (bio) During the winter of 1916, at the height of World War I, Second-Rank Captain Vladimir Grigor´evich Petrov, aged 35, found himself in a trouble-some situation. The Naval Procuracy in Kronstadt had opened a preliminary investigation: he was suspected of homosexual activity with his subordinates.1 Petrov refused to assist the investigation and said nothing about the sensitive topic. His reluctance to cooperate did not prevent officials from conducting the inquiry, but it meant that they had to rely on the testimonies of witnesses. More than 20 people were thoroughly questioned about Petrov's same-sex liaisons during his service at the Kronstadt Naval Base. Some of them had to answer the official investigator's questions two and even three times. As a result, the surviving paperwork provides a unique perspective on how homo-sexuality was discussed and perceived by people not professionally engaged with the subject. Since Michel Foucault first raised the question about the birth of the modern homosexual, historians have been quite prolific in researching and contextualizing the issue in various regions and countries. Alongside the important role of medical science, they argue, homosexual selfhood was forged by such factors as capitalism, the rise of free wage labor, secularization, the [End Page 451] spread of literacy, and urban growth.2 The present article seeks to contribute to this historiography by examining how the figure of the homosexual emerged and was understood outside the expert community in prerevolutionary Russia. The military context, I further suggest, shaped the perception of homosexuality in this case. Scholarship in this area is still relatively modest. In her groundbreaking book The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia, Laura Engelstein suggests that homosexuality had never been a subject of broad public discussion or political attention in Russia, as it was in England and Germany.3 By the turn of the century, however, she shows that a significant proportion of Russian legal scholars were advocating for a modernizing approach to homosexuality and the decriminalization of consensual male intercourse, although this agenda subsequently failed.4 "The reformers refused, however, to endorse a notion of privacy and individual self-determination that would have allowed adult males to deviate freely from public norms and reproductive sexuality and gender definition."5 According to Engelstein, Russian medical experts did not provide significant help to these legal reformers. Frustrated by the lack of autonomy within tsarist society, they were not as influential as their European colleagues: "The medical interpretations of homosexuality, which Foucault sees as crucial to the development of modern sexual identity in the West, had little effect on Russian legal thinking."6 One of the most important implications of Engelstein's analysis for the present article is her argument about the failure of the "political and sexual modernity" that Russian professionals had sought to achieve in late imperial Russia.7 Having worked mainly with printed sources and focusing her attention exclusively on medical and legal discourses among "educated Russians," Engelstein [End Page 452] ignores the question of how expert medical and legal debates might have influenced laypeople. What exactly could they have absorbed through the era's flourishing print culture on the question of homosexuality? Indeed, she admits the sexual question preoccupied not only professionals in the years following the revolution of 1905 but also began to attract attention "in settings open to a more general audience."8 A decade later, Dan Healey offered a different approach.9 Using previously unknown archival material, he demonstrates how a "masculine tradition indulgent of mutual eros," and the increasing visibility of male prostitution in St. Petersburg and Moscow by the end of the 19th century combined to shape the emergence of a homosexual subculture in the capital cities.10 He also discusses the intersection of masculinity and social status, arguing that class played a central role in same-sex urban sexuality: "Men who experienced same-sex desire expressed it according to the social roles they played."11 At the end of the 19th century, according to Healey, "traditional mutual male sexuality in the provinces highlights the apparent patriarchal confidence...

НАУЧНЫЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ РОССИЙСКОГО МОРСКОГО СОЮЗА

The article is devoted to the aspects of scientific activity of the Russian Maritime Union. This public organization in the early twentieth century set itself the task of reviving the Russian imperial navy after the defeat in the russo - japanese war of 1904-1905. Meetings of a public organization where scientific problems were discussed are considered. Special attention is paid to the existing rules for publishing a collection of scientific papers by the leaders of the Russian Maritime Union. Information is given on issues related to the colonization of remote areas of Siberia and the Far East. The reasons for the lag of Russian commercial shipping from Western European countries are investigated. The prerequisites for the successful development of German commercial shipbuilding and shipping in the early twentieth century are analyzed. The relationship between the problems of development of Siberian rivers and the unsatisfactory economic condition of remote Russian territories is traced. The history of domestic public organizations and naval affairs in the early twentieth century is studied. In addition, the organization of the Russian maritime union for the promotion of naval knowledge is being considered. The public organization subscribed specialized foreign and domestic literature and created libraries on these issues, open to the public. Then the Russian maritime union attracted such technical innovations as cinematog- raphy and filmstrips to promote naval knowledge among the Russian population.

The build-up of submarine forces of the Russian Imperial Navy in the Black Sea in 1910-1914

The purpose of the article of the article is to analyze the process of increasing the submarine forces of the Imperial Black Sea Fleet in 1910 – 1914. The measures taken by the top state and naval leadership of the Russian Empire to increase the submarine forces of the Russian Imperial Navy in the Black Sea on the eve of World War I. The issues of organization of tactical and special training of submariners, testing the interaction of submarines with surface forces are considered. The methodology of the research is based on the universal research principles of historicism, scientific objectivity, systematics, which allowed to analyze the main milestones of the process of increasing the submarine forces of the Black Sea Fleet in this period. The scientific novelty of the work is to determine that the newly created submarine forces of the Black Sea in the process of its expansion have become, in fact, a forge of submarine personnel for the Imperial Navy. It is highlighted that mastering the construction of submarines for the Black Sea Fleet contributed to the development of military shipbuilding in the south of Ukraine and the experience of Mykolayiv shipbuilders in their further construction. The peculiarities of life and way of life and training of crews and working off of tasks of combat training by boats in the sea, development of their base system are reflected. Historical parallels have been drawn in the process of increasing the combat capabilities of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the Naval Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine at present. Conclusions. Proper understanding and consideration by the state and military leadership of the Russian Empire of the lessons and conclusions of the Russian-Japanese War of 1904-1905 on the role and place of naval forces in the war allowed to use all possible ways to strengthen the state's naval defense on the eve of World War I. In particular, the involvement of public and private enterprises in the design and construction of the fleet, including such high-tech and new types of forces as submarines, and also the acquisition of licenses for the construction of boats on foreign projects. Creation and increase of submarine forces on the Black Sea promoted development of military shipbuilding on shipyards of the south of Ukraine, in particular, in Mykolayiv. This experience is extremely instructive and useful to take into account in the revival of submarine forces in the process of increasing the combat capabilities of the Navy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in modern conditions.

Engineer Pavel Izotov in Service in the Russian Imperial Navy and the Bulgarian Fleet

Engineer Pavel Izotov in Service in the Russian Imperial Navy and the Bulgarian Fleet

Across the Seven Seas: Is Russian Maritime History More Than Regional History?

Ryan Tucker Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and North Pacific's Strange Beasts of Sea, 1741-1867. 320 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-0199343416. $58.00. Igor' Vladimirovich Kurukin, PersidskiipokhodPetra Velikogo: Nizovoi korpus na beregakh Kaspiia, 1722-1735 (Peter Great's Persian Campaign: The Nizovoi Regiment on Shores of Caspian, 1722-35). 381 pp. Moscow: Kvadriga, 2010. ISBN-13 978-5917910468. Irina Mikhailovna Smilianskaia, Elena Borisovna Smilianskaia, and Mikhail Bronislavovich Velizhev, Rossiia v Sredizemnomor 'e: Arkhipelagskaia ekspeditsiia Ekateriny Velikoi (Russia in Mediterranean Region: The Archipelago Expedition of Catherine Great). 840 pp. Moscow: Indrik, 2011. ISBN-13 978-5916741292. The Russian Empire is haunted by many stereotypes, one of which is that it does not have a maritime tradition. At same time, Imperial Russian Navy is put forth as quintessential example of Russia's Westernization. (1) Given resources invested in developing navy and naval iconography in imperial capital, it is odd that few studies exist that examine Russian naval practices and maritime interests outside of an immediate strategic context. (2) Over past decade, essayists have observed an increase in maritime scholarship, proclaiming that the sea is swinging into view while offering new directions for research. (3) Meanwhile, maritime history has been put forth as a way to understand global history, (4) and scholarly monographs have given way to synthetic histories of many of world's seas, with chronological frameworks spanning centuries or even millennia. (5) The large academic publishers Routledge and Brill have recently launched series specializing in maritime history. (6) But while there has been an increase in study of watery subjects, little of that scholarship has included Russia. Could it be that geography truly is destiny? Or are Russian historians simply tired of trope that Russian expansion was driven by search for a warm-water port and thus reluctant to approach subject? The latter would certainly be a mistake, as imperial Russia bordered at least 13 seas (14, if you include Caspian Sea, which geographers now classify as a lake, but ancients considered an ocean) and a couple of oceans. For over two decades, Atlantic history has shown that oceans are not barriers between nations but rather interactive spaces that have facilitated networks of commerce and exchange, transportation of people, and dissemination of institutions and ideas. (7) Atlantic history is but one geographic subfield that was inspired by Ferdinand Braudel's assemblage of sea and surrounding lands into a single unit of historical analysis. (8) In Atlanticists' stead, scholars have argued that Indian and Pacific oceans were similarly sites of circulation of trade, migration, and cultural exchange. (9) Maritime historians have meditated on divisions and diverse experiences of populations living around a single oceanic basin, (10) and on similar experiences that historical actors encounter across different bodies of water. (11) Still other scholars have called for oceans themselves to be focus of maritime histories, for history to be retold from perspective of sea. (12) In short, perspectives developed by maritime historians are broad and not always in agreement with one another; they range from emphasizing similarities to inviting comparisons to mapping transnational currents. As Alexei Kraikovski recently noted, Russian history has its own tradition of scholarship on relationship of Russians and sea, although tradition could be reinvigorated with new perspectives that focus on different groups involved in this relationship and less passive constructions of environment. (13) The three books under discussion may well begin conversation on whether approaches and perspectives developed by maritime historians are useful for understanding Russian history. …

Review: Imperial Russian Navy, 1890s–1916, in Photographs from the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Review: Imperial Russian Navy, 1890s–1916, in Photographs from the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

The Bellingshausen-Palmer meeting

ABSTRACTThe celebrated meeting between Captain Bellingshausen of the Imperial Russian Navy and the American sealing skipper Nathaniel Brown Palmer, off the South Shetland Islands in February 1821, has often been described by following just one or other of the two men's divergent and in some respects irreconcilable accounts. The most contentious issue is whether or not Palmer told Bellingshausen about the existence of a body of land to the south of the South Shetlands, known today as the Antarctic Peninsula. This note attempts to reach a balanced assessment of the matter by examining evidence from both sides, including several previously unconsidered items. It concludes that, although the truth will never be known with absolute certainty, the basic American account is more plausible, by the narrowest of narrow margins, than the Russian.

Pictures from an Antarctic expedition: Mikhailov on the Bellingshausen voyage

ABSTRACTThe artist Pavel Nikolayevich Mikhailov (1786–1840) took part in the Antarctic expedition of the Imperial Russian Navy commanded by Captain F.F. Bellingshausen from 1819 to 1821. The author was invited to view the collection of Mikhailov's work, from two expeditions, that is held at the Russian Museum, St Petersburg. The Bellingshausen pieces in the collection are described, and their relationships to the smaller collection of Mikhailov's work for the Bellingshausen expedition, held at the State Historical Museum in Moscow, to the lithographs in theAtlasvolume of Bellingshausen's published narrative, and to the various versions of Mikhailov's images that have been published in the 20th and 21st centuries, are discussed.

Bellingshausen's first accounts of his Antarctic voyage of 1819–1821

ABSTRACTIn 1949 a reassessment of the Imperial Russian Navy's Antarctic expedition of 1819–1821 was promulgated in the Soviet Union. The contention was that Russian seamen had made the first discovery of the mainland of Antarctica, two or three days before the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula was sighted by a British expedition, under William Smith and Edward Bransfield, sent to take formal possession of the South Shetland Islands. The new Soviet line apparently required that an important passage in a report which Captain Bellingshausen had sent from Australia in 1820 should, as far as possible, be overlooked or downplayed. Nineteenth century editions of the report and its covering letter are translated, the contemporary ice vocabulary in which they were phrased is explained, and the practice of discounting parts of them in the past and continuing to ignore those passages today is discussed.

Cold war whaling: Bellingshausen and theSlavaflotilla

ABSTRACTOn 7 December 1945 a captured German whaling factory,Wikinger, was allocated to the Soviet Union under the terms of the Potsdam Agreement between that country, the United States and the United Kingdom. In the first section, this article presents the first detailed account of howWikingerwas seized by the Royal Navy and eventually transferred to Soviet ownership. The second section illustrates the hostile attitudes of western governments towards theSlavawhaling flotilla during the cold war, and the degree to which their suspicions were focused on the work of scientists assigned to the flotilla. The next four sections trace the fluctuating perceptions and presentations, during the Tsarist and early Soviet periods, of the Imperial Russian Navy's Antarctic expedition of 1819–1821, the problems in respect of Antarctica which confronted Soviet diplomacy and propaganda in the 1940s, and the new story, about Russians having been the first people to discover Antarctica, which was developed in order to address them. It is then possible, in the seventh section, to explain the political utility of theSlavaflotilla in the early 1950s. An eighth section sketches the divergent cultural fortunes of the Bellingshausen expedition and theSlavaflotilla after the period under consideration.This article discusses the use of whaling and history in support of Soviet Antarctic policy between the end of World War 2 and the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–1958. But theSlavawhaling flotilla did not just play a part in the historicisation of Soviet Antarctic policy. It was itself a historically constituted object, fraught with meanings on both sides of the cold war. For that reason the opportunity is taken to give a more detailed account of the flotilla's origins than has been available hitherto. The author notes that two contributors to this journal have preceded him in some of these matters (Armstrong 1950, 1971; Gan 2009). He ventures to suggest, however, that the connections between whaling, historiography and public information management in Soviet Antarctic policy have not been fully demonstrated before this.

Book Review: The Imperial Russian Army and Navy in Finland, 1808–1918

Book Review: The Imperial Russian Army and Navy in Finland, 1808–1918

Book Review: The Imperial Russian Army and Navy in Finland 1808-1918

Book Review: The Imperial Russian Army and Navy in Finland 1808-1918

Shorter notice. The Imperial Russian Army and Navy in Finland, 1808-1918. P Luntinen

Shorter notice. The Imperial Russian Army and Navy in Finland, 1808-1918. P Luntinen

The Tuamotu Islands and Tahiti

The final volume in the quartet of books on the naval, scientific and social activities of the Imperial Russian Navy in the South Pacific, this book focuses on the expeditions to Tahiti and the dangerous atoll chains to the east, known as the Tuamotus. Under the command of Captains Otto von Kotzebue and F.F. Bellingshausen, expedition members were the first to chart several of the Tuamotu islands. They also theorized correctly about coral reef and atoll formation, studied botany and collected ethnographica in a systematic way. On Tahiti, the Russians came into contact with King Pomare II, Queen Pomare Vahine, and members of the London Missionary Society. Having arrived there in 1797, the missionaries had effectively destroyed the underpinnings of the ancient Tahitian social and material culture. This led von Kotzebue to criticize publicly the Society, stating that, in his view, the religious practices being enforced in Tahiti by 1824 were a travesty of true Christianity. Barratt has made full use of Russian primary material housed in St Petersburg in describing the sites and individuals the visitors encountered. Contemporary aquarelles and drawings by the expedition artists Ludovik Choris and Pavel N. Mikhailov provide pictorial evidence. These are complemented by descriptions and photographs of many of the artifacts gathered by the Russian officers and now available to scholars in Russian and Estonian archives. In this book, as in the previous volumes in the set, Barratt dispels the myth that the Russians were landlubbers. He points out that highly educated and perceptive Russian scientists and naval officers made contact with aboriginal people in many parts of Oceania. Unlike their counterparts from other European nations, the Russians never made any territorial claims and they took pains not to provoke hostility with the islanders. Petersburg in describing the sites and individuals the visitors encountered. Contemporary aquarelles and drawings by the expedition artists Ludovik Choris and Pavel N. Mikhailov provide pictorial evidence. These are complemented by descriptions and photographs of many of the artifacts gathered by the Russian officers and now available to scholars in Russian and Estonian archives. In this book, as in the previous volumes in the series, Barratt dispels the myth that the Russians were landlubbers. He points out that highly educated and perceptive Russian scientists and naval officers made contact with aboriginal people in many parts of Oceania. Unlike their counterparts from other European nations, the Russians never made any territorial claims and they took pains not to provoke hostility with the islanders. Glynn Barratt is a Professor in the Department of Russian at Carleton University..

The Arctic Ocean hydrographic expedition 1910–1915

Abstract The Arctic Ocean Hydrographic Expedition of 1910–1915 represented a sustained and impressive effort by the Imperial Russian Navy to explore, survey, and chart the Northern Sea Route with a view to developing it as a commercial route. The expediton was provided with two specially‐built icebreaking research vessels, Taymyr and Vaygach. The two ships made a brief sortie through Bering Strait into the Chukchi Sea in the fall of 1910. Thereafter, for the following three years, they pushed steadily farther west along the arctic coast of Siberia, sounding, surveying, and pursuing scientific work as they went, and each year returning to Vladivostok for the winter. In 1914 they were ordered to attempt the through‐passage to Arkhangel'sk (in part because of the anticipated need for icebreakers in the White Sea in the event of the outbreak of war). Both icebreakers became beset in the eastern part of the Kara Sea and both suffered some damage from ice pressures, but having survived an enforced wintering they reached Arkhangel'sk safely in the fall of 1915. Apart from the impressive volume of scientific data which it accumulated, the major attainments of the expedition were the first Russian landing on Wrangel Island (in 1911), and the discovery (in 1913) of the archipelago of Severnaya Zemlya (originally named Nikolay II Land).