The Battleship NO ONE Wanted

The Imperator Aleksandr III was one of the last dreadnoughts built for the Imperial Russian Navy, a warship born in an age of empire yet doomed to drift through revolution, civil war, and political chaos. Intended for the Black Sea Fleet, she represented Russia’s answer to the Ottoman Empire’s new super-dreadnoughts, carrying twelve 12-inch guns in four triple turrets and boasting armor stronger than her Baltic cousins of the Gangut class. On paper, she was the pride of Russia’s southern fleet—powerful, balanced, and modern for her time. But her service life would become one of the strangest and most tragic odysseys in naval history.

Commissioned too late for the First World War, Imperator Aleksandr III—renamed Volia (“Liberty”) after the 1917 Revolution—barely entered service before the collapse of the Tsarist regime. As Russia disintegrated, her crew faced mutiny, desertion, and political upheaval. In 1918, she fled from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk to avoid capture, only for German forces to seize the ship and briefly operate her under their flag. After the Armistice, she passed to the Royal Navy and then to White Russian control during the civil war, renamed General Alekseev in honor of the anti-Bolshevik leader.

The ship’s early life mirrored Russia’s instability. Built by the RUSSUD and ONZiV yards at Nikolaev, her design was a scaled-down improvement of the Baltic dreadnoughts. She featured improved armor protection, a heavier 130 mm secondary battery, and refinements that drew British attention—particularly her triple turret design, which inspired later Allied experiments. Yet construction delays, inexperience, and the outbreak of war slowed her progress. By the time she was complete, the empire that had built her no longer existed.

When Empress Maria, her sister ship, was destroyed in a catastrophic internal explosion in 1916, it revealed the fragility of the Russian fleet and the dangers of poor cordite storage and rushed wartime construction. The loss haunted Aleksandr III’s builders and underscored how the Black Sea Fleet was collapsing just as its greatest weapons were being finished.

Under successive owners—German, British, White Russian, and finally French custody at Bizerte—the dreadnought’s identity continued to change. She became a refugee of empires, interned far from home as Europe reshaped itself. When Soviet Russia sought her return in the 1920s, negotiations collapsed amid political turmoil in France. By 1928, the once-mighty battleship was sold for scrap, and by 1936, the hulk of General Alekseev was gone forever.

Her guns may have survived—some accounts claim they were sold to Finland before the Winter War—but her story is largely forgotten: a battleship without a nation, adrift in history’s wake. From the optimism of Imperial shipyards to the chaos of revolution and exile, Imperator Aleksandr III stands as a symbol of how rapidly empires and their navies can vanish.

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Sources/Other Reading:

https://www.amazon.com/Italian-Battle...

https://www.amazon.com/Mussolinis-Nav...

https://www.usni.org/press/books/russ...

https://www.amazon.com/Warships-Sovie...

https://www.amazon.com/Warship-2015-J...

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