Cruiser Aurora". Ship number one of the Russian navy. Ship-symbol, ship-legend, ship-myth and … ship-curse. Kept by the one in whose honor it was named, "Aurora" outlived its "sisters" for almost a century, and by a whim of fate, it seems, is doomed to immortality.
Guardian Angel of "Aurora"
There is a good tradition in the Russian Navy - to give new ships the names of their glorious predecessors who have served their time. The 1st rank armored cruiser, laid down in 1897 at the Novoe Admiralty shipyard in St. Petersburg, was named after the sailing frigate Aurora, which heroically fought with the superior forces of the British squadron in the defense of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in 1854.
In turn, the name of the frigate was given by Nicholas I in honor of one of the most beautiful women of St. Petersburg - the maid of honor of Empress Aurora Demidova-Karamzina, with whom the emperor was probably secretly in love. But a generic curse hung over this lady, a kind of "crown of celibacy."
All men who decided to link their fate with her left the world prematurely. It is not for nothing that this femme fatale was called in the secular salons "Dawn betrothed to death." But she herself lived a long life and did not consider herself unhappy, pursued by evil fate, because she loved and was loved.
Upon learning that a new cruiser would bear her name, Aurora Karlovna exclaimed:
- Oh, if only it did not affect tragically on his fate!
Promotional video:
But the fears of the woman, who apparently became the guardian angel of the "Aurora", were in vain. This, in general, an ordinary, nothing special cruiser, ironically ascended to the very top of fame, lived an incredibly long life for a battleship, and his path is not over yet.
Miraculous rescues
"Aurora" was the "younger sister" of the same type of armored cruisers "Diana" and "Pallada". The attitude of the sailors to these three "goddesses of domestic production" was very skeptical. These ships had a lot of design flaws, their mechanisms were often out of order. They did not differ either in speed or in the power of weapons.
But the angel kept the Aurora. The first time he saved her from certain death in the battle of Tsushima. The cruising detachment of Rear Admiral Enquist performed the task of covering the transports. But this turned out to be beyond the power of four cruisers, which were hit by heavy fire from 16 Japanese ships. During the battle, the Aurora received 18 hits from medium and small-caliber shells, which caused quite serious damage to the cruiser.
Cruiser "Aurora" (1916)
Ship artillery suffered especially significant damage. The crew lost 15 people killed and 82 wounded. The commander of the cruiser, Captain 1st Rank Yevgeny Yegoriev, was fatally wounded in the head by a fragment of an enemy shell at a combat post in the wheelhouse. The very same "Aurora", having fired almost two thousand shells, did not cause serious damage to the enemy.
The Russian cruisers were saved from heroic death by a column of battleships that accidentally approached, who drove the enemy away. Nevertheless, the fairly battered ships could not break through to Vladivostok and went south to the Philippine port of Manila, where they were interned until the end of the war by the US authorities, under whose protectorate the Philippines was at that time.
The fate of "Aurora" also kept it in the First World War. On October 11, 1914, at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, the German submarine U-26 discovered two Russian cruisers: Aurora and Pallada (not the “older sister” who died in Port Arthur, but a new cruiser built after the Russo-Japanese War).
The commander of the submarine Lieutenant Commander von Berckheim correctly assessed the situation and preferred to fire a torpedo at a more tasty target - "Pallade". The new cruiser sank along with the entire crew, and the veteran managed to take refuge in the skerries. So "Aurora" escaped death for the second time.
In general, this "ordinary goddess" has not accomplished anything heroic in the entire history of its existence.
The shot that wasn't there
“But what about the legendary shot that served as the signal for the storming of the Winter Palace and marked the beginning of a new era in human history ?!” - you ask. Yes, there was no such shot. In October 1917, the Aurora continued to be overhauled, and all ammunition was removed from it. By chance, there was one blank charge on board, and they shot it, thereby calling the ships standing on the Neva "to be vigilant and ready." But it happened in the afternoon, long before the assault.
On October 24, the Military Revolutionary Committee assigned Aurora the task of restoring traffic on the Nikolaevsky bridge, which had been raised by the cadets the day before. Seeing the cruiser approaching the bridge, the cadets fled, and the ship's electricians were able to lower the spans. The ship itself turned out to be behind the bridge that cut it off from the Peter and Paul Cathedral and the Winter Palace.
So he could not damage the defenders of the Provisional Government, even if he had ammunition. And the signal to storm the Winter Palace was given from the Peter and Paul Fortress. About 30 volleys of gunfire were fired from its bastions, but only two shells hit the palace - the gunners did not want to kill their compatriots.
There is no documentary evidence of the Aurora shot. The logbooks of 1917, in which all the actions of the ship's crew were scrupulously recorded, disappeared without a trace. And we can say with complete confidence that the heroic cruiser of the revolution is just one of the propaganda symbols and great myths of revolutionary power.
Mystical Ship Soul
In the future, the invisible mystical power repeatedly saved the Aurora from destruction. Moreover, every time they tried to destroy it, it turned into a disaster for the country. So, when in 1917 the command of the Baltic Fleet prepared an order to sink a cruiser in the channel of the Gulf of Finland, on the approaches to Kronstadt, in order to prevent German squadrons from reaching Petrograd, this was prevented by the revolutionary-minded crew of the ship - and a few months later the October coup took place.
In 1941 it was planned to withdraw the "Aurora" from the navy and "put on pins and needles" - and the Great Patriotic War began.
And in 1984 the USSR Council of Ministers decided to overhaul the legendary cruiser for the 70th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. By that time, the underwater part of the ship had simply rotted, it was a solid sieve. Water was pumped out of the holds day and night; even pouring the bottom with a layer of concrete did not help.
A serious reconstruction of the lower part of the hull was required. But too little time was given to the shipbuilders of the Zhdanovsky plant for this matter. And then the Deputy Minister of the Shipbuilding Industry Igor Belousov submitted a salutary idea - to cut off the old underwater part, make the same new one and put the old surface part on top, and we did. And no one would have found out about what happened, but the shipbuilders could not or did not dare to hand over the old hull for scrap.
They decided to hide the cut off part in the Luga Bay, near the village of Ruchyi, where in the 1930s the “0object-200” was built by the forces of the Luzhlag convicts - Komsomolsk-on-Baltika, the base of the Baltic Navy. This most modern city at that time was never inhabited: it was blown up at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War in order not to surrender to the enemy, and they did not begin to restore it. The remains of the pre-war concrete pier have been preserved. Not far from it, they decided to flood the hull of the Aurora, for which they dug a kind of trench at the bottom.
By that time, the locals had thoroughly raked the legendary remains, removing everything they could: from bronze valves, steel ladders and portholes to copper sheathing sheets. And when they began to lower the 120-meter colossus into the trench, they missed, the hull did not lay down as planned, and part of it remained sticking out above the water.
On the day of the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution, the renewed "Aurora" was received by the General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. He respectfully examined the famous six-inch gun, which banged along the Winter Palace, not suspecting that this was also a substitution: a real tank gun perished in battles on the Duderhof Heights as part of battery "A", along with other guns taken from the Aurora to protect Leningrad from the Nazi invaders …
And all the more, he could not see the underwater part of the cruiser, where the steel sheets were connected not by rivets, as before, but by welded seams. Then Gorbachev, having learned how he was cheated, tore up and threw, but the job was done, nothing could be fixed. Aurora again avenged her outrage - the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And yet, what is all the fuss about? Some experts claim that the current "Aurora" is not a real one, but just a replica of the legendary cruiser. But after all, only the lower part has been replaced, and the upper part has been preserved, including the interior of the premises. We will not deny the right to the title of a person to a disabled person who has lost his legs, which have been replaced with prostheses ?! "Aurora" has kept the main thing - its name, mystical soul, guardian angel.
This summer, the cruiser will return from the next major overhaul and will stand in its usual place at the quay wall. And it will no longer be a symbol of the revolution, but a monument to the national shipbuilding industry. I would like to believe that there will be no more attempts to rent it for scrap. This, you know, is fraught!
Mikhail YURIEV
