Russian monitor Smerch
Smerch at anchor; her two turrets are painted white
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| Class overview | |
|---|---|
| Operators: |
 Imperial Russian Navy
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| Preceded by: | Uragan class |
| Succeeded by: | Charodeika class |
| Cost: | 554,100 rubles |
| Built: | 1863–65 |
| Completed: | 1 |
| Scrapped: | 1 |
| History | |
 Russian Empire
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| Name: | Smerch (Russian: Смерч) |
| Namesake: | Waterspout |
| Ordered: | 25 June 1863 |
| Builder: | Admiralty Shipyard, Saint Petersburg |
| Yard number: | 117 |
| Laid down: | 1 December 1863 |
| Launched: | 23 June 1864 |
| Completed: | 1865 |
| Renamed: |
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| Reclassified: | As coast-defense ironclad, 13 February 1892 |
| Struck: |
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| Fate: | Scrapped after 2 April 1959. |
| General characteristics (as completed) | |
| Type: | Monitor |
| Displacement: | 1,560 long tons (1,585 t) |
| Length: | 188 ft 8 in (57.5 m) (waterline) |
| Beam: | 38 ft 2 in (11.6 m) |
| Draft: | 12 ft (3.7 m) |
| Installed power: | |
| Propulsion: | 2 shafts, 2 Horizontal direct-action steam engines |
| Speed: | 8 knots (15 km/h; 9.2 mph) |
| Complement: | 133 officers and crewmen (1867) |
| Armament: | 2 × twin 60-pounder 7.72-inch (196 mm) smoothbore guns |
| Armor: |
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Smerch (Russian: Смерч) was a monitor built for the Imperial Russian Navy in the early 1860s. She was designed by the British shipbuilder Charles Mitchell and built in Saint Petersburg. The ship spent her entire career with the Baltic Fleet. She ran aground and sank shortly after she entered service in 1865. Smerch was refloated and repaired shortly afterwards. She became a training ship sometime after 1892 and was stricken from the Navy List in 1904. The ship was hulked five years later and renamed Blokshiv No. 2. She was in Finland when that country declared its independence in 1918, but was returned to the Soviets after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed. Blokshiv No. 1, as the ship was now known, was sunk by German artillery fire in 1941. She was salvaged the following year and remained in service until she was stricken in 1959 and subsequently broken up.
The Russian Admiralty Board had previously licensed the design of the Passaic class from the United States and wished to compare the John Ericsson-designed gun turrets of those ships with the turrets designed by the British inventor Captain Cowper Coles. The board therefore commissioned Mitchell to design a twin-turret monitor based on the Danish ironclad Rolf Krake and to build it in the shipyard that he had modernized for the board in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
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Wikipedia