It all probably started with this quote here:
"… Progressive, advanced Asia has dealt an irreparable blow to backward and reactionary Europe … The return of Port Arthur by Japan is a blow dealt to all reactionary Europe."
Well, and the Russian national disease - a holy conviction, rooted in the era of Peter the Great, that the Russian is always worse, and the Russians cannot do things as efficiently as foreigners. Yes, and it's convenient - to blame everything on technology, the bosses seem to have nothing to do with it, the people are wild and crooked, what to do? Meanwhile, the Russian fleet before the Russo-Japanese War was technically advanced, worse than the English and French, but no worse than the American or Italian. And this was manifested literally in everything. Take the same power plant (main power plants): on the battleship "Rostislav" back in 1898, they switched to oil as fuel.
And the results were impressive:
"The steam in the oil-fired boilers was remarkably even, without the fluctuations that always occur with coal heating, and within the limits set by the specification."
Oil heating was slowly introduced both on the destroyers of the Black Sea Fleet and on the Uralets gunboat; it was planned on the Potemkin as well, but in the end it did not take off. And curvature along with stupidity has nothing to do with it. Two extraneous factors worked: firstly, oil required more qualified specialists, which was, in principle, solvable, but secondly, the lack of the possibility of refueling in ocean voyages, which finally put an end to the idea. The fleet could not afford two types of fuel, and the world had not yet matured to oil (more precisely, fuel oil). As a result, logistics won out over innovation, but the development and purchase of new power plants did not stop.
In 1901, the destroyer "Vidny" of the "Buyny" type was laid down, in 1902 it was decided to complete it with a power plant in the form of two oil engines from Lutsk, three thousand horsepower each. The development of engines went slowly, this was not yet built in those days, and as a result, the destroyer was completed according to the original project, during the war it was somehow not up to experiments. Nevertheless, a step was taken, and a considerable step, ICEs increasingly became an alternative to steam engines. Although there was complete order with the turbines:
“… On September 23, 1904, a turbine destroyer Carolina disguised as a yacht (displacement of 160 tons, speed of 31 knots), disguised as a yacht, sailed from Great Britain to Libau, arriving at its destination on September 28. The destroyer was enlisted in the Russian fleet in March 1905 under the name "Swallow"."
Already during the war in England (through the French intermediaries and under the guise of a yacht), a turbine destroyer was purchased for the production of experiments. "Swallow" survived until 1923. To summarize - the backwardness of reactionary Europe is somehow not noticeable - in terms of the GEM we were in no way inferior to other countries, there were also our own studies, there were purchased ones, like everyone else. The Japanese, by the way, in this sense were far from us, simply for the reason that they did not build more armored decks at that time. So maybe the cannons?
No, our guns may not have been like that, but the problem is that our medium-caliber guns were French of the Canet system, and no one scolded the 203-mm Brink systems and Obukhov's 305-mm ones. The same 305-mm, installed on the railway transporters, served until the Second World War, and even a little after its end. In advanced Asia, guns, by the way, were Armstrong systems. Even the shells, which many consider to be the culprits of our defeats, and they carried the elements of high-tech - both relieving and detonating - these are all the consequences of Russian experiments. Yes, it didn’t work, but at the same time it was, the work was carried out in the most active way. In the same way as for armor, and for unsinkability, and anti-torpedo protection …
With the light hand of the battalion Novikov, everyone knows about rangefinders, or rather, their absence, but where and what are they missing?
“The fire control system was installed upon the arrival of the Retvizan in Russia. It included one Barr and Stroud rangefinder and five Lujol micrometers, which made it possible to determine the angular distances to the known vertical value of the target (for example, the height of the masts). The measured distance from micrometers entered the conning tower on the main rangefinder dial, where the artillery officer set the distance on the dial that he considered most likely. In the same place, in the conning tower, there was a combat indicator that determined the course angle of the target, and a projectile dial indicating the type of projectile. All this information was sent to the receiving dials in the towers, batteries and cellars by means of synchronous electrical communication. The disadvantages of this system were the limited operating range (up to 40 kbt) and weak short-circuit protection."
Let's say the Borodintsy went into battle with two rangefinders, Barr and Stroud each. There were, and about 40 cables - these are modern "inventions", in those days, a battle even for 30 was considered unlikely - far away. The Japanese had the same rangefinders and about the same number - "Asama" went into battle with the "Varyag" with two rangefinders Barra and Struda. But I have not heard about attempts to create a central fire control system among the Japanese. And so as not to walk twice - the firing range of the 254-mm guns of the "backward" Russian "Victory" reached 20.5 km, which was even a little too much at that time, it was possible to direct at such distances only by eye …
In a word - wherever you stick, there is "backwardness" everywhere. And it especially manifested itself in the submarine forces:
"In March 1902" destroyer No. 113 "was enlisted in the lists of the fleet as" Torpedo boat No. 150 "."
Destroyer No. 113 is our first-born Dolphin, the first full-fledged submarine in the Russian fleet.
By the end of the war, there will be a whole detachment of submarines in Vladivostok, the Japanese will buy their first-borns in the United States after the war. Japan, by the way, will never catch up with Russia in submarines - neither in technology nor in tactics of use. Another question is that all this was not decisive - the era of steel sharks of the ocean would begin later, and in 1904 these were fragile 100-150 ton ships capable of defending their bases, no more. Nevertheless, the groundwork was already in place, and while many were thinking - we were building.
We were also backward in aviation, so backward that we made for the Second Squadron a whole cruiser-balloon-carrier called "Rus".
“Enlisted in the fleet on November 19, 1904, this ship became the world's first balloon-borne cruiser. His weapons were one spherical balloon, four kite and four signal balloons. However, due to technical problems caused by the tight timeframe of the conversion work, the ship turned out to be incapable of a long ocean voyage: it was not included in the squadron sent to the Far East and was soon sold."
9 aircraft, while it is lighter than air, in the First World War it will already be seaplanes and seaplane carriers. It was not for nothing that the watchkeepers of the Navarin during the 2TOE campaign saw a balloon, and the squadron crews were afraid of submarines - for our sailors this was the norm, and they could not imagine that the Japanese (advanced) had none of this. And in vain they could not, and it was so.
The topic could be continued for a long time - it could be about radio, it could be about coastal batteries, or it could be about collapsible destroyers or something else, but why? And so it is clear - technically we were very "backward" and the Japanese were "advanced". And it is easier to repeat the words Lenin said, in essence, about the state system and social relations, than to admit that the iron is not to blame. And people are not to blame, those who served the iron. The fault is those who drew plans on maps and paper, and suffered giddiness from successes in foreign policy, while underestimating the enemy. Logistics and planning, coupled with corruption, would destroy the dreadnought fleet.
