Imperator Aleksandr III () was one of five s built for the Russian Imperial Navy in the first decade of the 20th century. The ship was completed a few months before the start of the Russo-Japanese War in February 1904 and was assigned to the Second Pacific Squadron that was sent to the Far East six months later to break the Japanese blockade of Port Arthur. The Japanese captured the port while the squadron was in transit and their destination was changed to Vladivostok. During the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, Imperator Alexander III was sunk by Japanese gunfire with the loss of 778 men, her entire crew.
Design and description
The Borodino-class ships were based on the design of the French-built , modified to suit Russian equipment and building practices. They were built under the 1898 program "for the needs of the Far East" of concentrating ten battleships in the Pacific. Imperator Aleksandr III was long overall, had a beam of and a draft of around at deep load. Designed to displace , she was over overweight and actually displaced . This caused a problem during sea trials on 6 October 1903 when she made a high-speed turn that caused her to heel 15° and flooded the embrasures for the guns. Her intended crew consisted of 28 officers and 754 enlisted men, although she carried 826–846 crewmen in service.
The ship was powered by a pair of four-cylinder vertical triple-expansion steam engines, each driving one propeller shaft, using steam generated by 20 Belleville boilers. The engines were rated at and designed to reach a top speed of . Imperator Aleksandr III, however, only reached a top speed of from during her official machinery trials on 23 July 1903. She carried enough coal to give her a range of at a speed of .
The ship's main battery consisted of four guns mounted in two twin-gun turrets, one forward and one aft of the superstructure. The secondary armament consisted of 12 Canet quick-firing (QF) guns, mounted in twin-gun turrets. A number of smaller guns were carried for defence against torpedo boats. These included twenty 75-millimeter QF guns and twenty Hotchkiss guns. She was also armed with four torpedo tubes, one each at the bow and stern above water and two submerged. Imperator Aleksandr IIIs waterline armor belt consisted of Krupp armor and was thick. The armor of her gun turrets had a maximum thickness of and her deck ranged from in thickness. The armored lower deck curved downwards and formed an anti-torpedo bulkhead.
Service
Construction began on Imperator Aleksandr III, named after Tsar Alexander III, on 5 September 1899 at the Baltic Works in Saint Petersburg. The ship was laid down on 23 May 1900 and launched on 3 August 1901. In August 1902 she was in Reval for the visit of the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, and took part in combined fleet maneuvers with ships from the German navy. She was completed in November 1903 at the cost of 13,979,000 rubles.
On 15 October 1904, Imperator Alexandr III set sail for Port Arthur from Libau along with the other vessels of the Second Pacific Squadron, under the overall command of Vice Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky. Rozhestvensky led his squadron, including Imperator Alexandr III, down the Atlantic coast of Africa, rounding Cape of Good Hope, and reached the island of Nosy Be off the north-west coast of Madagascar on 9 January 1905 where they remained for two months while Rozhestvensky finalized his coaling arrangements. The squadron sailed for Camranh Bay, French Indochina, on 16 March and reached it almost a month later to await the obsolete ships of the 3rd Pacific Squadron, commanded by Rear Admiral Nikolai Nebogatov. The latter ships reached Camranh Bay on 9 May and the combined force sailed for Vladivostok on 14 May. While exact figures are not available for Imperator Aleksandr III, it is probable that the ship was approximately overweight as she and her sisters were overloaded with coal and other supplies; all of which was stored high in the ships and reduced their stability. The extra weight also submerged the waterline armor belt and left only about of the upper armor belt above the waterline.