page_title: Russian battleship Poltava (1911)
section_title: Service
hierarchical_section_title: Russian battleship Poltava (1911) / Service
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Ворошиловская батарея на о.Русском, Владивосток, Россия This is a photo of a cultural heritage object in Russia, number: 2510023194 This template and pages using it are maintained by the Russian WLM team. Please read the guidelines before making any changes that can affect the monuments database!
context_page_description: Poltava was the second of the Gangut-class battleships of the Imperial Russian Navy built before World War I. The Ganguts were the first class of Russian dreadnoughts. She was named after the Russian victory over Charles XII of Sweden in the Battle of Poltava in 1709. She was completed during the winter of 1914–1915, but was not ready for combat until mid-1915. Her role was to defend the mouth of the Gulf of Finland against the Germans, who never tried to enter, so she spent her time training and providing cover for mine laying operations. She was laid up in 1918 for lack of trained crew and suffered a devastating fire the following year that almost gutted her. Many proposals were made to reconstruct or modernize her in different ways for the next twenty years, but none were carried out. While all this was being discussed she served as source of spare parts for her sister ships and was used as a barracks ship. She was finally struck from the Navy List in 1940 and scrapping began at a very leisurely rate. She was intentionally grounded in late 1941 to prevent her from being sunk in some inconvenient location by the Germans. She was refloated in 1944 and scrapped beginning in 1949.
context_section_description: Poltava was built by the Admiralty Shipyard at Saint Petersburg. She was laid down on 16 June 1909 and launched on 23 July 1911. At the end of October 1914 she was struck by her sister Gangut which jammed her kedge anchor, damaged her hull and delayed her trials to late November 1914. She entered service on 30 December 1914 when she reached Helsinki and was assigned to the First Battleship Brigade of the Baltic Fleet. However, gunnery and torpedo trials had to be postponed until mid-1915 because of the thick winter ice. She was the only ship of the class to perform a full-power speed trial, which she did in November 1915. She played a passive part in World War I as her role was to prevent the Germans from breaking into the Gulf of Finland, something the Germans never even tried. She ran aground in June 1916, but suffered little damage. Her crew participated in the February Revolution of 1917. She, and most of the Baltic Fleet, evacuated Helsingfors between 12 and 17 March 1918 despite the winter ice in the Gulf of Finland. Due to a shortage of crew she was placed into long-term conservation at Petrograd in October 1918.
  On 24 November 1919 a fire broke out in her forward boiler room and gutted much of her interior. She was henceforth used as a source of spare parts for her sisters. Along with the Borodino-class battlecruiser Izmail she was considered for conversion to an aircraft carrier in 1924 for service in the Black Sea, but this proved to be too ambitious and expensive given the state of the Soviet economy shortly after the end of the Russian Civil War. A more modest goal was to restore her to her original configuration and the Baltic Works actually began work in 1925, but exhausted the allotted funds on 15 February 1926 by which time she was estimated to be 46.5% complete. On 7 January 1926 she was given the name Frunze, after the recently deceased Bolshevik military leader Mikhail Frunze. Subsequent plans that focused on reconstructing her as a modernized equivalent to her sisters or even as a battlecruiser, with one turret deleted to save weight, were considered, but finally abandoned on 23 January 1935 when all work was stopped. In 1934 two of her turrets were sent to reinforce the Vladivostok Fortress fortifications on Russky Island. Kliment Voroshilov approved one last plan to turn her into a floating battery, but the Baltic Works had no capacity to spare and this project was cancelled on 9 July 1939. During this period she was used as a barracks hulk while she was stripped for parts, until she was formally discarded 1 December 1940, after scrapping had already begun at a leisurely pace. After the German invasion she was towed to Kronstadt and run aground late July 1941 near the Leningrad Sea Canal. During the Siege of Leningrad her hull was used as a base for small ships. She raised on 31 May 1944, towed to Leningrad and scrapped beginning in 1949.
  After World War II two turrets and their guns were used to rebuild Coast Defence Battery 30 (Maksim Gor'kii I) in Sevastopol. It remained in service with the Soviet Navy through 1997. With her two other turrets remaining in Vladivostok, on Russky Island, Poltava is sometimes jokingly called "the world's longest battleship" in Russia.
caption: Poltava's turret as seen in Voroshilov Battery museum, Russky Island, Vladivostok
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