Aurora

Aurora was one of three Pallada-class protected cruisers built in Saint Petersburg for service in the Pacific Ocean, and all three sisters would serve in the Russo-Japanese War. Her construction yard was the Admiralty Shipyard, the same yard that would rebuild her a century later. That later restoration turned up a detail of her making: some of the ship's parts, including her armour plates, were originally manufactured in Britain.

Her armament shifted with her duties. By 1915, during her Baltic war service, the ship was rearmed with fourteen 152 mm (6-inch) guns. Those guns would themselves be conscripted twice over: in 1918, after she was moved to the naval dockyard at Kronstadt, the new 6-inch pieces were taken out and mounted on floating batteries for the Bolsheviks to use in the civil war, and in the Second World War her guns went ashore again for the land defence of Leningrad. Twice the ship gave up her teeth to the fighting on land.

On 10 October 1903 Aurora left Kronstadt in Admiral Virenius's reinforcing squadron for Port Arthur, only to be recalled from the Red Sea over the protest of Admiral Makarov. Refitted, she sailed east again with Admiral Rozhestvensky's Baltic Fleet, serving in Admiral Enkvist's cruiser squadron under the flagship Oleg. In the Dogger Bank incident she took five hits from confused friendly fire, which killed the ship's chaplain and a sailor.

At the Battle of Tsushima Aurora was only lightly damaged, but her captain, Evgeny Egoriev, was killed; he was buried at sea on 3 June 1905. After nightfall torpedo boats attacked her and Oleg, and Enkvist transferred his command to Aurora and took his ships to Manila and American internment. On that passage the ship's doctor rigged her X-ray equipment and performed the first post-battle X-rays in Russian naval history.

Through the First World War Aurora patrolled the Baltic and carried out shore bombardment, before moving to Petrograd for repairs in late 1916 — into a lawless capital of food shortages and a cold winter. During the February Revolution many of her enlisted men sided with the Bolsheviks. After officers fired pistols to restore order, the crew seized Captain Mikhail Nikolsky and ordered him to carry a red flag; when he refused, he was shot dead along with an unknown number of officers.

A revolutionary committee elected a new captain, and Aurora became the first major Russian warship to fly the red flag of the Bolshevik cause. On the eve of the October Revolution she dislodged loyalist cadets from the Nikolayevsky Bridge, then fired the famous blank shot that, according to Russian lore, signalled the assault on the Winter Palace. It is for this single round that the ship is best known in Russian culture.

Aurora returned to service as a training ship in 1922. In the Second World War her guns were taken ashore for the land defence of Leningrad while the ship lay docked at Oranienbaum, where she was repeatedly shelled and bombed; on 30 September 1941 she was damaged and sunk in the harbour. Salvaged and repaired after the war, she opened as a museum ship in Leningrad in 1957, a monument to the October Revolution.

During a capital restoration at the Admiralty Shipyard her deteriorated hull below the waterline was replaced with a new welded hull built to the original drawings, the cut-off lower section sunk near the decommissioned Ruchi Naval Base. In 2013 Russia's defence minister announced plans to make her flagship of the Russian Navy for her historical and cultural importance; overhauled at Kronstadt, she returned to her Saint Petersburg berth on 16 July 2016. Her stern flies a special version of the Naval Ensign, a tradition dating to her 1927 Order of the Red Banner, and the 1965 Soviet film The Salvos of the Aurora Cruiser retold her revolutionary hour.