Fyodor Ushakov

Fyodor Fyodorovich Ushakov was born in 1745 in the village of Burnakovo in the Yaroslavl Governorate of the Russian Empire. He belonged to a modest family of the Russian nobility; his father, Fyodor Ignatyevich Ushakov, had served as a sergeant in the Preobrazhensky Life Guards Regiment before retiring to a small estate. Ushakov received a professional naval education at the Naval Cadet Corps in Saint Petersburg, which he entered in the early 1760s and left in the mid-1760s to begin service as an officer in the Baltic Fleet. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774 he was sent south to the Don Flotilla and took part in the campaigns that established a Russian naval presence on the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. In the following decade he was closely involved in the creation of the Black Sea Fleet and the building of its principal base at Sevastopol, and he acquired a reputation for demanding high standards of seamanship and gunnery while showing unusual concern for the health, training, and morale of ordinary sailors.

The Russo-Turkish War of 1787–1792 made Ushakov the leading Russian naval commander of his generation. Serving first as a squadron commander and then as commander of the Black Sea Fleet, he defeated Ottoman forces in a series of engagements that included the battle off Fidonisi in 1788, the actions in the Kerch Strait and at Tendra in 1790, and the battle of Cape Kaliakra in 1791. He discarded much of the conventional line-ahead doctrine of the age, concentrating his attack on the enemy flagship and using rapid, aggressive maneuver to prevent the opponent from forming a coherent line. Historians of the period note that he did not lose a battle in which he held command and that no ship under his immediate command was lost to the enemy. These victories confirmed Russian control of the Black Sea and contributed to the conclusion of the Treaty of Jassy.

In 1798–1800, during the War of the Second Coalition, Ushakov led a combined Russian and Ottoman squadron into the Mediterranean. He seized the Ionian Islands from the French, the campaign reaching its climax in the successful siege of Corfu in 1799, a fortress then regarded as one of the strongest in Europe. He helped to establish the Septinsular Republic as a protectorate and conducted further operations off the Italian coast. His relations with British allied commanders were not always easy, reflecting differences of strategy, rank, and national interest. Recalled to Russia in 1800, he subsequently held senior administrative and training appointments in the Baltic Fleet and was promoted to the rank of admiral. He left active service in 1807.

After his retirement Ushakov settled in the village of Alekseyevka in the Tambov Governorate, near the Sanaksar Monastery, a house with which his family was already connected through his uncle, who had been its abbot under the monastic name Theodore. He lived quietly, attending the monastery’s services, practicing personal asceticism, and distributing alms. During the French invasion of Russia in 1812 he devoted his resources to the care of the wounded and to the support of a local militia, though age prevented him from taking the field. He remained unmarried and had no children. He died in 1817 and was buried at the Sanaksar Monastery.

The Russian Orthodox Church glorified Fyodor Ushakov as a saint at the beginning of the twenty-first century. He was canonized as a locally venerated saint of the diocese of Saransk in 2001, and in 2004 the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church authorized his church-wide veneration as a righteous warrior. He is commemorated on several days in the liturgical calendar, including the dates associated with his glorification and with the uncovering of his relics, and he is honored as the patron saint of the Russian Navy. His relics are kept at Sanaksar Monastery. In the secular sphere his name has been given to warships, to the Soviet and later Russian Order of Ushakov, and to numerous streets and institutions, and he occupies a central place in Russian naval historical memory as a commander who united professional success with personal piety and responsibility for his men.