Cruiser (3f/2m).
L/B/D:
415.7 × 55 × 21.5 (126.6m × 16.8m × 6.6m). Tons:
6,823 disp. Hull:
steel. Comp.:
571. Arm.:
8 × 6, 24 × 3, 8 × 1pdr; 3 × 15TT. Armor:
2.5 deck. Mach.:
triple expansion, 11,600 ihp, 3 screws; 19 kts. Built:
New Admiralty, St. Petersburg, Russia; 1900.
In 1904 Aurora was in company with another cruiser and some torpedo boats en route to join Russia's Pacific Fleet at Vladivostok when war with Japan began. Ordered back to the Baltic, she was assigned to the Second Pacific Squadron—10 battleships, 12 cruisers, 7 destroyers, and other vessels—which sailed for the Far East in September under Vice Admiral Zinovi Petrovich Rozhestvensky. Steaming across the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, the Russian fleet opened fire on what they suspected might be Japanese torpedo boats, but which turned out to be English fishing boats. Russian marksmanship was appalling and only one trawler was sunk, with the loss of two fishermen. However, the Russian guns also fired on each other, and Aurora was hit by five shells from the flagship Kniaz Suvorov. (Japanese ships were not unknown in European waters. Britain and Japan had been allies since 1902, and the Russians had received reports of Japanese torpedo boats in the Baltic and the North Sea. Twelve years later, seventeen Japanese destroyers would be deployed in the Mediterranean during the German submarine campaign against Allied shipping in World War I.)
War with Britain was narrowly averted, and the fleet sailed on, coaling at Tangier, Dakar, Madagascar, Singapore, and Saigon before passing into the Straits of Tsushima. There, in the watery defile between Japan and the Korean peninsula, Admiral Heihachiro Togo's fleet annihilated the Russian fleet. Battle between the two cruiser squadrons was joined at about 1330 on May 27, 1905, and the Russians soon had the worst of it. With ten dead, including Captain Egorev, and eighty-six wounded, Aurora retired from the battle with Zemchug and squadron flagship Oleg. Three weeks later the three ships put into Manila, where they were interned by the United States until the conclusion of hostilities, when Aurora returned to European Russia.
Aurora remained in the Baltic through World War I. Following the abdication of Nicholas II and the installation of the provisional government on March 15, 1917, Aurora was undergoing repairs at St. Petersburg. The government ordered her to sea for trials as a way of removing her and her revolutionary crew from the capital. These orders were countermanded by the Central Committee of the Baltic Fleet and she took up station on the Neva River. When Lenin staged a coup against Alexander Kerensky's government on November 6 (October 24 in the Russian calendar), Aurora's pro-Bolshevik crew responded by anchoring their ship near the strategic Nikolaevsky Bridge. At 0210 on November 7, Aurora fired blanks to signal the Bolsheviks' determination to force the ouster of the government. Guns from the Peter and Paul fortress then opened fire on the Winter Palace, and the government resigned that day. Aurora played no further role in the Russian Revolution, but the Bolshevik government ordered her preserved as a memorial and museum on the Neva, where she is still open to the public.
Mawdsley, The Russian Revolution and the Baltic Fleet. Watts, Imperial Russian Navy.
