The Tsar's Last Armada - Tapa dura

The epic story of the most extraordinary naval expedition in history and of one of the most catastrophic naval battles ever. . On May 14-15, 1905, in the Tsushima Straits near Japan, an entire Russian fleet was annihilated, its ships sunk, scattered, or captured by the Japanese. It was among the top five naval battles in history, equal to those of Lepanto, Trafalgar, Jutland, and Midway. The Japanese lost only three destroyers, but the Russians lost twenty-two ships and thousands of sailors. To this day Russian ships throw wreaths on the waves when passing the Korea Strait. The Russians had traveled for nine months to be destroyed in a few hours. Because they were afraid of capture in the Suez Canal, their legendary admiral, dubbed "Mad Dog," led them on an extraordinary 18,000mile detour from the Baltic Sea, around Europe, Africa, and Asia to the Sea of Japan. They were burdened by the Tsar's incompetent leadership and the old, slow ships that he insisted be included to bulk up the fleet. Moreover, they were under constant fear of attack, and there were no friendly ports to supply coal, food, and fresh water. The level of self-sufficiency achieved by this squadron was not again attained in naval practice until the Second World War. With a novelist's eye and a historian's authority, Pleshakov tells of the Russian squadron's long, difficult journey and swift, horrible defeat.

Constantine Pleshakov is a member of the new generation of Russian historians. He received his Ph.D. from the Soviet Academy of Sciences and was Director of the Geopolitics Center there until 1995. Pleshakov has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Oslo, Norway. Since 1998 he has been a Visiting Professor at Mount Holyoke College. He is the co-author of the Lionel Gelber Award- winning Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev, which was translated into three languages, and Basic Books' The Flight of the Romanovs. He has published six novels and a collection of short stories in Moscow. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.