Explosion of the battleship Imperatritsa Mariya

On the morning of 20 October 1916 (7 October by the Julian calendar, then in use in Russia), in the roadstead of Sevastopol, the newest Russian dreadnought, Imperatritsa Mariya, flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, blew up. A fire broke out in the magazine of the forward main-armament turret, followed by a series of explosions. In less than an hour the ship capsized and sank about half a mile from the shore. More than 200 sailors were killed. The cause of the disaster was never explained.

Pride of the fleet

Imperatritsa Mariya, named in honour of the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, mother of Nicholas II, was the first of a class of dreadnoughts built for the Black Sea Fleet at the Russud yard in Nikolayev. She displaced about 23,000 tons, carried twelve 305 mm guns in four triple turrets and had a crew of more than 1,200 men. She arrived at Sevastopol in the summer of 1915, and her entry into service changed the balance of forces in the Black Sea. Until then the old Russian battleships had been unable to catch the German-Turkish battlecruiser Goeben, which sailed under the Turkish flag as Yavuz. The new dreadnought matched her in firepower. She covered bombardments of the Turkish and Bulgarian coasts, and in 1916 twice fired on the light cruiser Midilli, the former Breslau, which escaped each time. In the summer of 1916 Vice-Admiral Alexander Kolchak took command of the Black Sea Fleet and made Imperatritsa Mariya his flagship.

The disaster

The ship lay at anchor in the Northern Bay. Shortly after six in the morning sailors noticed smoke coming from around the forward turret. According to most accounts, at about 6.20 a.m. came the first, massive explosion, which threw up a column of fire and wrecked the forward part of the ship. Others followed. According to one account, 15 further explosions were counted within 48 minutes. The ship’s captain, Captain Ivan Kuznetsov, ordered the magazines to be flooded. A group of sailors led by an engineer, Michman Ignatyev, managed to open the flooding valves of the forward turret’s shell rooms and probably prevented an explosion that would have torn the whole hull apart. All of them were killed. Kolchak came out to the burning ship in a launch and directed the rescue himself, but the ship could not be saved. After another explosion, near the torpedo compartment, water flooded the forward compartments. Imperatritsa Mariya went down by the bow, heeled to starboard and capsized. The multi-ton gun turrets fell out of the hull and sank to the bottom.

Casualty figures differ between sources. Most often 225 or 228 killed and about 85 seriously wounded are given. Other tallies, which include men who died later of wounds and burns, give even higher figures. The Black Sea Fleet had lost its most powerful ship. The sinking of the flagship, and in harbour rather than in battle, was also a great blow to Kolchak’s prestige.

Accident or sabotage?

The cause was investigated by a special commission from Petrograd chaired by Admiral Nikolai Yakovlev, whose members included the eminent naval architect Aleksey Krylov. It considered three possibilities: spontaneous combustion of the propellant, carelessness with fire or with the propellant itself, and deliberate arson. It established that everything had begun with a fire in the forward propellant-charge magazine, but could not determine its cause. It drew attention to serious negligence in controlling access to the magazines, through which outsiders could have got into them. Many historians consider the most likely cause to have been spontaneous ignition of decomposing smokeless powder, which caused similar disasters in other navies. For the same reason the British cruiser Natal most probably blew up. Only two and a half months earlier, at Taranto, the Italian dreadnought Leonardo da Vinci had sunk after an explosion. The Italians were convinced it was the work of Austro-Hungarian saboteurs, but this was never proved.

The sabotage theory never went away. In the 1930s the Soviet political police broke up a German intelligence network in Nikolayev whose leader, Viktor Verman, allegedly confessed to having prepared the explosion on German orders. Some Russian historians accept these statements, made under investigation by the Soviet political police (OGPU), as proof. Others doubt their reliability. The matter remains unresolved to this day.

Following a scheme proposed by Krylov, the wreck was raised with compressed air, still upside down. It surfaced in May 1918, when the Germans were already occupying Sevastopol. During the revolution and the Civil War nobody was able to repair it. In the 1920s the ship was broken up for scrap. Her gun turrets were recovered from the seabed, and according to some sources their guns later went to a coastal battery defending Sevastopol in the Second World War.