Inevitably, the overall economic and technological backwardness of Russia had an impact on the shipbuilding industry. Matters were worsened by the government's reliance on state-owned works (Baltic, Admiralty, Obukhov, Izhorsk, etc.) to build most of its ships. Management of these works at that time was usually very bureaucratic, with little conception of profit, costs or productivity. The naval officers who ran these works also frequently had limited engineering knowledge. As a result, ship-construction in Russia was expensive by international standards and slow.[196] At a time when naval technology was improving rapidly slow construction times were particularly dangerous, since even new ships risked being obsolescent on completion. The MTK itself often introduced changes while construction was already under way. This caused further delay and confusion, and could result in errors in design. One solution to Russia's problems would have been greater reliance on private industry, as occurred after 1906, when the government privatised some works and gave many orders to private firms (especially for non-capital ships), thus attracting large-scale private injection of capital into the Russian shipbuilding industry. Before 1905, however, Russia had only five private works even partially engaged in shipbuilding: these firms operated at a loss, partly because when forced to give orders to private firms the naval ministry preferred to place them abroad.[197]
As a result of the naval construction programmes, by the first years of the twentieth century Russia had moved into third place among the world's navies, with 229 ships as against Britain's 460 and France's 391.[198] Many new types of ships were built, including Russia's first submarine, Delfin, which was launched in 1903. Among the classes of ships built were armoured coastal defence ships (Admiral Ushakov class of 4,127 tons) whose obvious theatre was the Baltic Sea; Poltava class battleships (10,960 tons) which followed the normal European model and the three faster battleships of the Peresvet class (12,674 tons), designed to operate for long periods at sea. A few battleships were ordered abroad but their design was closely supervised by the MTK and in the case of the Tsesarevich (12,912 tons), built in France, served as a model for a class of five battleships subsequently built in Russia (Borodino class of 13,516 tons).[199]
During these years a major shift occurred in the design and proposed deployment of armoured cruisers. The earlier cruisers (Rurik, Rossiia and Gro- moboi) were designed as long-distance commerce raiders, with British trade as their obvious target. Equal in size to battleships and incorporating many new technologies, they initially aroused exaggerated fears in Britain which resulted in a very expensive class of British armoured cruisers being built to match them.[200] The armoured cruisers of the Bayan class (the Bayan itself was launched in 1900) were, however, designed to operate in more limited waters and to fight alongside battleships if necessary.[201] Their likeliest enemy was seen as Japan, which had already built a number of similar armoured cruisers. For this reason, in comparison to the earlier commerce-raiders the new cruisers sacrificed long-range cruising capability in order to maximise armour and guns for fleet actions. A similar evolution was evident among Russia's lighter ('protected') cruisers with earlier ships (e.g. the Diana class of the 1895 programme) being seen primarily as commerce-raiders and later ships (e.g.
Variag, Askold, Bogatyr and Novik) being designed to operate together with the battle-fleet.
The structure and governance of the fleet and the Naval Ministry were defined by the laws of 1885 and 1888. The ministry was comprised of a number of chief administrations (e.g. medicaclass="underline" hydrographic) and committees (e.g. the MTK) but its most important core institution was the Main Naval Staff, which was responsible for the navy's preparedness for war. The Main Naval Staff, however, was swamped in various day-to-day administrative responsibilities. Like many other navies at the time, Russia lacked a true naval general staff, responsible for pre-war strategic planning and overall control of wartime operations. A proposal to establish such a staff was rejected at the end of the nineteenth century and the small (twelve-man) strategic unit established within the Main Naval Staff on the eve of the Japanese war had no chance of seriously affecting wartime operations. The annual war games at the Nicholas Naval Academy had some impact on strategic thinking but although Admiral Makarov had intelligent and aggressive ideas about strategy, the dominant tendency among Russia's senior admirals was defensive - stressing the defence of key positions (e.g. Port Arthur during the war with Japan) and seeing naval assistance to the army largely in terms of the secondment of personnel and weapons. The staffs of the individual fleets saw themselves as mere advisory bodies and showed little initiative.[202]
The prevailing view of tactics was to fight in line ahead or in surprise encounter battles. The squadron's commander was supposed to control movements by flag, semaphore and telegraph from his flagship. The 'two-flag' system was spreading slowly at the turn of the century. S. O. Makarov, N. L. Klado and N. N. Kholodovskii all published useful work on tactics but the point to stress is that the Russian navy had no single and official tactical doctrine which could have provided a common guide for senior officers. The fighting instructions which did exist were either uselessly general (e.g. ship captains should obey the signals of the commanding admiral as much as possible), extremely narrow (e.g. where to keep tubs of sand) or absurdly pedantic (e.g. the requirement for officers to wear swords in combat). Not until the war with Japan had already begun was the first true battle manual for an armoured fleet issued. This was The Instructions for Campaigns and Battles written by the new commander of the Pacific fleet, Admiral Makarov.[203]
Peacetime training was organised in accordance with the Instructions for Preparing Ships for Combat and with the schedules of individual naval units. It was in general carried out in port and in training sessions devoted to individual, specific tasks. Mine-warfare training units existed in the Baltic and Black sea fleets: the former also trained radio experts. The first wireless stations were set up on ships in the autumn of 1900 and in the course of 1901-2 almost all major ships received them. As the Far Eastern fleet grew in size, the first training schools (for quartermasters - in 1898) and training ships were set up there too. The largest training unit in the Baltic fleet was devoted to gunnery. But the training concentrated on shooting at much shorter ranges than was to be the practice during the Japanese war and was therefore of limited benefit. In 1901 the Technical Commission of gunnery officers in Kronstadt embarked on drawing up new rules for combat. These were completed in 1903, too late to be influential in training gunnery officers and sailors for the Japanese war. On the other hand, the annual training cruises in the Atlantic were of real use in raising preparedness for combat.[204]
Sailors were conscripted on the same basis as soldiers though with longer terms of active service and shorter periods in the first-line reserve (five years in each category). As the fleet grew in the first years of the twentieth century, so did the number of conscripts: between 1900 and 1905 the number of conscripts in the fleet grew from 46,700 to 61,400. There were roughly 15,000 first-line reserves and 40,000 much less well-trained so-called 'naval militia'. In 1905-7 roughly 30 per cent of sailors were said to be of 'working class' background, a far higher proportion than in the army.[205] Given the complexities of warships in the age of steam it made excellent sense to conscript many skilled and literate men into the navy. But with the rapid growth of worker radicalism in the 1890s this carried obvious political dangers.
196
Russian completion rates were very slow by British or German standards, less so by French or Italian ones. See eg. chapter 5 of P. Ropp,
197
K. F. Shatsillo,
198
L. G. Beskrovnyi,
199
For good coverage of these ships in English, see S. McLaughlin,
200
R. M. Melnikov,
202
Beskrovnyi,