Jutland: The Baltic Sea
Russian Battleships, Part Three
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
May 2025

Jutland: Baltic Sea is an expansion book for Great War at Sea: Jutland, adding German, Swedish and Russian ships planned but not completed. It’s all brand new, making use of those Swedish and Russian ships in Jutland 2e plus 70 new pieces.

It would not be a simple thing for the Imperial Russian Navy, to rebuild their once-proud Baltic Fleet using Russian resources. Russian shipyards, though expanding, did not have the capacity to build all of the dreadnoughts that new fleet commander Nikolai von Essen wanted, and that his Tsar wished for him to acquire.

Essen commanded the British-built armored cruiser Rurik after her eventual delivery to Russia, and found the complaints about her overstated. The Russians had introduced many changes after construction had begun, some of which could not be addressed without scrapping the work already done and starting over. The Russians had refused this option, yet resented that their input was not reflected in the final product (something wargame publishers know well).

Yet not all problems had come from the Russian side. The builders, Vickers and Sons, had addressed these after construction and Essen found the improvements satisfactory. The admiral may have been overly optimistic in his eagerness to obtain new dreadnoughts; Vickers never delivered the promised spare barrels for Rurik’s main armament and the ship fought throughout the First World War with worn-out guns.

Russia’s Revenge

Despite those problems, Essen argued, the Russian Navy should attempt to purchase four Revenge-class battleships under construction for the Royal Navy. In addition, he suggested ordering additional ships to other designs. To avoid the problems with Rurik, the Russians would order ships whose design drafts had been fully completed and would not attempt to alter them during construction. While that would mean building ships less capable than the most recent warships laid down, it would assure that they actually could deliver on their claimed capabilities.

Essen made his proposal to buy the four Revenges in April 1914; at the time, five of them were on the slipways (three at private yards and two at naval dockyards). The Royal Navy would be highly unlikely to sell any of them, so the Russians would have been asking for repeat versions built in private British yards. Vickers had enormous capacity to build large ships, with six slipways suitable for dreadnought construction. At the time of Essen’s proposal, Vickers had one Revenge-class ship on the slipway (Revenge herself) and the Turkish dreadnought Reshadieh already afloat and nearing completion. Worker shortages had appeared, however, even before war drained the labor pool.

It would have been a large order – the largest foreign arms purchase made in Britain up to that time – and likely would have been shared with other yards, given the oligopolistic nature of British shipbuilding at the time. Britain had the industrial capacity to build four extra dreadnoughts for the Russians. The questions would have been financial and diplomatic.

The Revenge-class Royal Sovereign would serve the Red Navy in 1944.

Four Revenge-class ships would carry a price tag of about ₤10 million. The total Russian naval budget for 1914 amounted to 110 million gold rubles, or about ₤11.3 million, though the ships would be amortized over several budget years. A Revenge-class ship, enormously more capable than the Gangut class then still under construction, cost slightly more than half as much per ship.

Doubling the naval budget would mean massive additional borrowing, for a budget already in the red. The state’s income came from vodka: both in taxes on the drink, and through the state monopoly on its sale. Lesser sources included railway income, land taxes and property taxes, though these were heavily regressive. Rich Russians did not pay taxes. Tariffs, historically known as an undependable source of government revenue, kicked in about 10 percent.

Russia remained credit-worthy, though already deeply in debt (debt payments ate about 20 percent of the national budget). Would the French bankers who had funded Russian military expansion and the railway net (seen as important for wartime mobilization have kicked in another bond issue for British-built ships? And would the British government, not nearly as closely tied to St. Petersburg as it was to Paris, allow the order to go through and antagonize Germany still further?

Had the Russians somehow found the gold rubles in the couch cushions, the purchase would have given the Baltic fleet a core of well-protected super-dreadnoughts with enormous firepower, though not a lot of speed.

The Vickers Super-Dreadnought

Among the sketches forwarded to Essen by arms dealer Basil Zaharoff, Vickers Design 651 had originally been presented to the Japanese in 1912. She would have been a marked step forward in fighting power, and likely would have been beyond the capacity of Japanese industry at the time. She certainly was more ship than Russia could build two years later, but that didn’t deter interest in the design.

Design 651 would have been huge: a long, flush-decked ship listed at 30,000 tons’ displacement (the stated capabilities imply that she would have come in well above that figure). She would carry a main armament of eight 16-inch guns in four twin turrets, all on the main deck as in the usual Russian practice (no super-firing arrangement for the turrets) and a secondary battery of just four 6-inch guns.

She would be well-protected, with an armored belt 12 inches thick, and she would be fast: her turbines would produce 70,000 horsepower, good for 26 knots. She would be able to keep up with the new Borodino-class battle cruisers, but offer slightly more firepower and significantly more protection.

Vickers-supplied sketches of Russian 16-inch turrets; Design 651 would carry the upper version.

Just where the ship would be built is unclear; in asking for plans, Essen had definitely implied that these would be for ships to be built in Russian yards with British technical assistance. Vickers produced a prototype 16-inch, 45-caliber gun in 1917 for the Russians; it underwent testing but the Obukhov Works could not have built a gun of that size even without wartime troubles. Vickers also provided detailed designs for twin and triple turrets to house the new weapons.

Vickers could have built this ship, for a price, but she would have been a difficult project even for a British shipyard. She appears in Jutland: Baltic Sea in two examples, giving the Russians a ship that can stand up to even the German late-war paper projects.

The Leftovers

In September 1912, the Russian State Duma approved the construction of the four battle cruisers of the Borodino class, each to be armed with a dozen 356mm (14-inch) guns in four triple turrets. Baltic Works and New Admiralty, both St. Petersburg shipyards, each laid down two ships in December of that year.

Design work on a 356mm gun had begun in 1910, when the Black Sea Fleet’s Imperatritsa Mariya class dreadnoughts entered the design stage, possible to be armed with such a weapon. The gun was not ready to use in those ships, which ultimately carried the same 305mm piece as the Baltic Fleet’s Gangut class.

When it came time to fit out the Borodino class, Vickers delivered only ten of the contracted 36 barrels; Obukhov, given the order for the other 40 (the total included a dozen guns for coastal defense batteries plus another dozen spares), produced just one of them. Even had the guns been ready, the Navy had ordered key components for the triple turrets in Germany. While those could be made in Russia, the overworked factories could not provide them without years of delay.

Vickers-supplied sketch of the 14-inch triple turret for the Borodino class.

The coast-defense guns were to have been mounted in twin turrets, and those were fully made in Russia. That led to a proposal to build a pair of coast-defense monitors using the available guns and turrets; the date of this proposal is unclear, and may have actually been made after the war for the new Red Navy, as by then a few more gun barrels had been delivered by Obukhov. Some sources claim the monitor design called for three triple turrets, but the triple turret was never completed and probably would have swamped the ship.

Jutland: Baltic Sea includes the twin-turret version, which is still a badly unbalanced designed that might well have been a danger to her own crew in all but the calmest of waters. She has a powerful armament, not a lot of protection, and the speed of a garbage scow. But she does get those heavy guns to sea.

You can order Jutland: Baltic Sea right here.
Please allow an extra two weeks for delivery.

Sign up for our newsletter right here. Your info will never be sold or transferred; we'll just use it to update you on new games and new offers.

Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

Daily Content includes no AI-generated content or third-party ads. We work hard to keep it that way, and that’s a lot of work. You can help us keep things that way with your gift through this link right here.