The Black Sea Fleet needed dreadnoughts, and in 1911 Russia authorized three. The second was laid down that October at the Nikolayev shipyard as Ekaterina II. The Russians, however, had a reputation for building ships that came out overweight, so they brought in the British firm Vickers, whose consultants advised enlarging the hull for extra buoyancy - a change that added over two million gold rubles to the cost and delayed her by three months. When she was finally completed in October 1915, she was a floating fortress: 556 feet long, mounting a dozen 12-inch guns in four triple turrets, armored at the belt and turrets against the heaviest shells afloat. Renamed Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaya, she carried the name and the ambition of the empress who had first won this coast for Russia.

For all her firepower, the great ship's war was oddly bloodless. Her most famous encounter came in January 1916, when she caught the fast battlecruiser Yavûz Sultân Selîm - the former German Goeben - at long range off the Anatolian coast. She hurled 96 shells across some 22,000 yards and scored only splinter damage before the swifter Ottoman ship slipped out of reach, having done her no harm in return. Days earlier she had nearly died by accident: a Russian destroyer, mistaking her for an enemy, loosed seven torpedoes at her, and every one missed. Mostly she shepherded smaller vessels - escorting seaplane carriers toward Varna, covering minelayers off the Bosporus, screening raids along the Turkish shore. She was a giant whose guns rarely spoke.

Then history overtook her. When the February Revolution of 1917 swept away the monarchy, the ship named for an empress could no longer keep that name. In April 1917 she was rechristened Svobodnaya Rossiya - 'Free Russia' - a battleship rebranded for a new order. The change ran deeper than paint. That November, ordered to sortie and intercept an enemy cruiser, her crew simply refused and turned back to Sevastopol; the old discipline of the tsar's navy had dissolved into the ferment of revolution. Soon the Bolshevik Decree on Peace ended offensive operations against the Central Powers altogether. The mightiest ship of the Black Sea now belonged to a country reinventing itself in real time, unsure what its navy was even for.

The end came fast. As German troops advanced in the spring of 1918, the ship fled Sevastopol for Novorossiysk. But the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk demanded that the Soviets hand her over to Germany, and rather than surrender the pride of the fleet, the decision was made to destroy her. On 19 June 1918, a Russian destroyer fired four torpedoes into Svobodnaya Rossiya in Novorossiysk harbor. The fourth touched off a massive explosion; she capsized and sank in four minutes. She lay largely undisturbed through the 1920s. In 1930, salvage crews prying into her magazines set off a torpedo warhead, which detonated a powder magazine and flung a column of water a hundred meters into the air - a last, thunderous echo of a battleship that had fired her guns in anger only a handful of times, and met her death at the hands of the navy that built her.