River Monitors: Uragan Class

[Brian James]

Russian Uragan Class Monitor Latnik pictured at Helsinki c1870..She was one of two ships of the Class of six to built at Carr & MacPherson Shipyards, St Petersburg. Spending her entire career with the Baltic Fleet, the ship was only active when the Gulf of Finland was not frozen, but very little is known about her service. She was stricken in 1900 from the Navy List, converted into a coal barge in 1903 and renamed Barzha No. 38 and then Barzha No. 326. Abandoned by the Soviets in Finland in 1918, the ship was later scrapped by the Finns. Latnik was designed to be armed with a pair of 9-inch smoothbore muzzle-loading guns purchased from Krupp of Germany and rifled in Russia, but the rifling project was seriously delayed and the ship was completed with nine-inch smoothbores. These lacked the penetration power necessary to deal with Ironclads and they were replaced by license-built 15-inch smoothbore muzzle-loading Rodman guns in 1867–68. The Rodman guns were replaced around 1876 with the originally intended nine-inch rifled guns.