Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya

Design

One day, a bunch of Russians got real drunk and made a battleship. Work in progress.

Service History

Commissioned as battleship Gangut into the 1st Battleship Brigade of the Baltic Fleet on January 11th, 1915, Gangut joined her sister-ships Sevastopol, Petropavlovsk, and Poltava spending 1915 performing distant cover for minelaying duties in the Baltic, never sailing further into the Baltic than the shoreline of modern-day Latvia. She spent the entirety of 1916 idling in the port of Helsinki, then under Russian rule. Her idle sailors joined the rebellions during the February Revolution in 1917, leaving the ship undermanned as her sailors drove the Tsar out of St. Petersburg. As the internal situation of the Russian Empire rapidly began to disintegrate, the provisional Russian government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers, part of the treaty requiring Gangut and the Russian fleet anchored at Helsinki in March 1918 or have the now-independent Finns intern them, even though the Gulf of Finland was still frozen over. Gangut and her sisters managed to escape to Kronstadt in mid-March, in a trip that later became known as the “Ice Voyage”. As the Soviets drove the White Russians loyal to the Tsar out of Russia, Gangut was laid up in early November 1918, having essentially run out of men as her sailors joined the fighting in the homeland.

Following the Soviet victory and the establishment of the Soviet Union, Gangut was not reactivated until the mid-1920’s, renamed Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya in honor of the October Revolution of 1917 in June 1925. She was partially modernized from her reactivation until July 1926, when she re-joined the Baltic Fleet. Her duties henceforth were nothing more than training exercises, until she returned to the Baltic Works in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) for a more extensive modernisation. She returned to the Baltic Fleet again, resuming training exercises until the outbreak of the Winter War in 1938, where she bombarded Finnish coastal batteries in December 1939, before the Gulf of Finland froze over, preventing further naval support. She sailed to Tallinn shortly after the Soviets occupied Estonia, receiving another minor modernisation in 1940. Upon the German Invasion of the Soviet Union, Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya was still in Tallinn, but she was forced to sail to Kronstadt by the invading Germans. In late September 1941, direct bomb hits had knocked out her two front turrets, forcing her to return to besieged Leningrad for repairs, returning to service by November 1942. Much of her wartime service was repeated fire support missions against the Germans besieging Leningrad, until the siege was finally lifted in January 1944. Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya supported the Leningrad-Novgorod Offensive that month, and the Vyborg-Petrozavodsk Offensive in June of 1944. For her service, she received an Order of the Red Banner in late July 1944.

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  Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya in 1934, after her modernization

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  Luftwaffe aerial photograph of the damaged Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya in Kronstadt, 23 September 1941