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Peter the Great ascended the throne in 1689. Under the guise of Peter Mikhailov, carpenter, the young Czar traveled to The Netherlands and England to learn how to build ships. In 1714, his fleet defeated the Swedes at Hango, thus opening through the Baltic a "Window to the West" for his backward country.
Peter's successors frittered away the fleet, but when Catherine the Great came to power in 1762, she began a massive rebuilding program. To find enough officers to command her new ships, Catherine collected foreign naval men almost as fast as she collected lovers. Among them was the American Revolutionary War hero, John Paul Jones, who, despite his bravery and gift for quick phrasemaking, had risen no higher than captain in the U.S. Navy. In return for an admiral's rank, Jones took command of a Russian sailing fleet composed of four battleships, eight frigates and assorted smaller craft that helped chase the Turks from the Black Sea. Unfortunately, his morals were nearly as bad as Catherine's, and rival admirals used a scandal about his deflowering a young Russian girl to chase him out.
Throughout the 19th century, Russia remained the world's third largest naval power (after Britain and France), but it was a largely untested one. The testing came in the 1904-05 war with Japan. In the straits of Tsushima, the Japanese met a fleet of 37 Russian ships and sank or captured all but four of them. It was the last time the Russians fought a naval engagement on the high seas.
What was left of the navy became a hotbed of anti-czarist agitation. In 1917, the guns of the cruiser Aurora fired a blank salvo at the Winter Palace in Petrograd and started the October Revolution. At first, sailors were the new Soviet government's most trusted fighters, but Lenin managed to alienate them. He put in charge of the navy a commissar who was, of all things, a woman, named Larisa Reisner-Raskol-nikova, and refused to allow the sailors to organize their own self-ruling local governments. As a result, the Baltic Fleet suddenly mutinied in 1921. Lenin crushed the revolt, but he never forgave the navy. He demoted it to the inglorious position of "naval forces of the Red Army" and decreed a new strategy that called for only a defensive fleet whose main weaponry would be submarines.
By 1932, the U.S.S.R. had some 25 subs, but Lenin's successor, Stalin, was dissatisfied with such an invisible fleet. In the mid-1930s, he reinstated the navy as an independent service and started building a huge surface fleet. The Germans captured the partly finished hulks when they swept into Russia in 1941. Thus the mission of defending the Red Army's coastal flanks fell to the Soviet navy's ragtag fleet. Most seagoing men would have chafed at such a coastline assignment, but a young captain named Sergei Gorshkov welcomed it as an opportunity.