Russian monitor Smerch

The Russian monitor Smerch (Смерч - "Tornado") was built for the Imperial Russian Navy in the early 1860s. She was built in England and assembled in Saint Petersburg. The ship was assigned to the Baltic Fleet for her entire career. Smerch was hulked in 1904 and renamed Blokshiv No. 2. She was still in existence in 1941.

Design and description
The design of Smerch was inspired by the American twin-turret monitors built during the American Civil War. She was fitted with a ram and her crew numbered 153 officers and men. Her turrets weighed 175 LT, were rotated by an auxiliary steam engine, and were based on designs of the British inventor Cowper Coles.

Smerch was 189 ft long overall. She had a beam of 38 ft and a draft of 11 ft. The ship displaced 1461 LT. Smerch was fitted with a double bottom that could be flooded in combat to reduce her freeboard. Bilge keels 100 ft long were mounted on her hull to reduce rolling.

Propulsion
The ship had two simple horizontal direct-acting steam engines, built by Maundslay, Sons & Field of London, each driving a single 2.44 m propeller. Steam was provided by three rectangular boilers. The engines produced a total of 700 ihp which gave the ship a maximum speed of 8 kn. Smerch carried 250 LT of coal.

Armament
Smerch was armed with two Obukhov 9 in smoothbore, muzzle-loading guns. She was designed to have two 60-pounder guns in each turret, but her turrets were too small to accommodate a pair of the newly adopted, larger Obukhov guns. The ship was rearmed with two 20-caliber 9-inch Obukhov breech-loading rifles sometime in the mid-1870s; each gun weighed about 15 LT. By the late 1880s Smerch was fitted with a secondary armament of four 4-pounder and four 1-pounder (37 mm) quick-firing guns.

Armor
Smerch had a complete waterline belt of wrought iron that was 4.5 in thick amidships and thinned to 4 in at the ends of the ship. It completely covered the hull from the upper deck to 4 ft below the waterline. The armor protection of the circular turrets was 4.5 inches thick and was backed by teak in two layers, 8 in and 4 inches thick, respectively. The inside of the turret was lined with a 1 in iron plate. The area around the gun ports was reinforced by 1.5 in plates to give a total thickness of 6 in. The walls of the ship's oval conning tower were also 4.5 inches thick. Watts and Gardiner claim that her deck was one inch thick, but this is not supported by other sources.

Service
Smerch was constructed at the Charles Mitchell shipyard in England, broken down and shipped to Saint Petersburg for reassembly. Mitchell leased part of the Galernii Island Shipyard for this task and assembly began on 7 April 1863. She was laid down on 19 November 1863, launched on 23 June 1864 and completed in 1865. The ship spent her career with the Baltic Fleet. Smerch was stricken from the Navy List in 1904 and renamed Blokshiv No. 2. She was still in existence in 1941.