The collapse of the Russian Empire and the emergence of the Soviet Union did not lessen the Black Sea’s importance in two World Wars
After the ill-conceived Crimean War, an eventful 62 years passed before the British and French sent their armies to Ukraine again. It was late 1918 and the Russians had crumbled, while the Ottoman Empire was teetering on the brink. At the beginning of the 20th century Sevastopol’s status was not only strategic but symbolic, making it one of Russia’s three great cities after St Petersburg and Moscow.
Russia’s empire never stopped improving Sevastopol with boulevards and museums, no matter if foreign tourists were prohibited from visiting. Its significance as a naval base only grew as advanced weapons like submarines joined the fleet in 1916 to be employed as minelayers for thwarting Turkish shipping.
Years before the outbreak of the First World War, the revolt of 1905 swept the Russian armed forces’ ranks after defeat by Japan in the Far East. Within the Black Sea Fleet disgruntled sailors mutinied and seized the Potemkin, a sleek 12,000-ton dreadnought bristling with guns, in an historic protest that was suppressed by the czar’s secret police. Following the carnage of the First World War and the Romanov dynasty’s bitter came a devastating civil war. The clash between loyalist Whites and the Bolsheviks inevitably reached Sevastopol and the Black Sea Fleet.
By then the Allies knew a greater threat was coming from Russia; the defeated Germany, whose armies briefly occupied Crimea in the summer of 1918, could not maintain its presence in Eastern Europe. A French attempt to bolster the anti-Bolshevik Russians in southern Ukraine was premature, with an ineffective task force getting stuck in Odesa until March 1919 while the White armies crumbled before the Bolshevik vanguard. Facing surrender or worse – exile and execution – in the end the White remnants led by General AI Denikin, together with the Black Sea Fleet, abandoned Sevastopol with the help of a Franco -British expedition. On 13 November 1920 the Black Sea Fleet reached Anatolia and ceased to exist, its armoured ships either abandoned or repossessed by neighbouring countries.
Yet the new Soviet regime continued the work of the bygone empire in reinforcing Sevastopol and its fleet. The fortress city itself gained new defences with two enormous batteries, the 30th and the 35th, that each had turrets armed with 305mm howitzers. An interesting change the Soviets
