From Libau to Tsushima: A Narrative of the Voyage of Admiral Rojdestvensky's Fleet to Eastern Seas, Including a Detailed Account of the Dogger Bank Incident

In 1904, Russia sent its Baltic Fleet on an 18,000-mile journey to confront Japan, a voyage that would become one of naval history's most infamous disasters. Evgenii Politovskii, a civilian shipbuilder on his first cruise, witnessed it all. Unlike the career officers around him, Politovskii brought an outsider's clear-eyed curiosity to the fleet's strained morale, mechanical failures, and mounting dread. His account captures the voyage's extraordinary scope: the tense passage through the North Sea where the fleet famously mistook British trawlers for enemy torpedo boats at Dogger Bank, nearly triggering war with Britain; the desperate stops in neutral ports where the ships were sometimes driven out by their own allies' diplomatic maneuvering; the endless anxiety about Japanese mines lurking unseen. Written by a man who would die at Tsushima, the book carries the weight of prophecy. This is not triumphant military history but something rarer: a front-row seat to imperial collapse, told by someone who understood ships but not the political catastrophe that was sending them to destruction.