Latest / The Romanov Dynasty: Rise, Power, and Bloody End — Fexingo History / Catherine the Great and the Dnipro Flotilla: River Power
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- Lucas: When Catherine the Great dreamed of restoring the Greek Empire and placing her grandson Constantine on a throne in Constantinople, she knew she'd need a navy. But before the Black Sea Fleet, there was a smaller, more experimental force that few history books mention: the Dnipro Flotilla. Luna: I don't think I've ever heard of that. Lucas: It actually began under Empress Anna, decades before Catherine took power. In 1736, during the Russo-Turkish War, the Russian army needed to take the Ottoman fortresses of Ochakiv and Kinburn at the mouth of the Dnipro River. The problem was supply — the steppe was dry and exposed to Tatar raids. So they looked to the river itself. Lucas: The solution was a flotilla of shallow-draft boats that could move troops, artillery, and provisions down the Dnipro and into the Black Sea. They built two types of vessels: traditional Zaporozhian Cossack boats, called chaiky — literally 'sea gulls' — which were long, fast, and rowed by up to sixty men, and European-style galleys, built under the supervision of foreign engineers hired by the Russian court. Luna: So it was a hybrid fleet — Cossack know-how and Western technology? Lucas: Exactly. And it worked. In 1737, the Dnipro Flotilla — officially called the Little Russian Flotilla in some documents — supported the siege of Ochakiv. The galleys bombarded the fortress from the river while the chaiky raided Ottoman supply ships and kept the Tatars from reinforcing the garrison. Ochakiv fell, and Kinburn followed. Lucas: But the flotilla's success was short-lived. The Treaty of Niš in 1739 returned Ochakiv and Kinburn to the Ottomans, and the flotilla was largely dismantled. The boats rotted in the mud of the Dnipro estuary for decades. Luna: So Catherine basically revived it. Lucas: She did, but with a grander vision. In the 1770s, as part of her Greek Project, Catherine ordered the reconstruction of the Dnipro Flotilla, now officially the Black Sea Fleet's forerunner. Grigory Potemkin personally supervised the building of new ships at the Dnipro shipyards, using both local timber and imported Swedish iron. The flotilla was crucial in the capture of Ochakiv again in 1788 — this time permanently for Russia. Lucas: One of the lesser-known figures in this story is a Scottish admiral named Samuel Greig, who served in the Russian navy and helped train the flotilla's crews. He was from Fife, but he ended his life as a Russian hero, dying aboard his flagship during the Battle of Hogland in 1788. His son, Alexei Greig, would go on to command the Black Sea Fleet in the next century. Luna: Wait — so a Scot helped build Catherine's river navy? That's unexpected. Lucas: It was part of a broader pattern. Catherine actively recruited foreign officers — British, Dutch, Greek, even a few Americans after the Revolution — to modernize Russia's fleet. The Dnipro Flotilla was a testing ground for these officers, many of whom had never seen a river like the Dnipro, with its rapids and shifting sandbars. Lucas: The flotilla also had a cultural dimension. The Cossacks who crewed the chaiky had their own songs and traditions, and their boat-building methods were passed down orally. When the Imperial officers tried to impose standard naval regulations, there was friction. The Cossacks didn't salute, didn't wear uniforms, and insisted on cooking their own food on board — kasha with salted fish. Luna: I can imagine the foreign engineers pulling their hair out. Lucas: But they adapted. And the chaiky proved surprisingly effective in shallow waters where European galleys ran aground. In fact, the Russian naval command eventually ordered the construction of a hybrid design — a galley with a Cossack-style hull, lower draft, and a single mast with a lateen sail. They called it a 'new-model chaika'. Lucas: By the end of Catherine's reign, the Dnipro Flotilla had evolved into the core of the Black Sea Fleet, but it never entirely lost its riverine character. The ships that bombarded Ottoman forts at Ismail and Anapa were descendants of those early chaiky and galleys, and the crews still included many Zaporozhian Cossacks — until Catherine disbanded the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775, of course. Luna: That's the irony, isn't it? She used the Cossacks to build her navy, then destroyed their independence. Lucas: It's a recurring theme in Russian history. But even after the Sich was gone, individual Cossacks continued to serve in the flotilla, now as Imperial subjects. Some of them rose to become officers, and their descendants formed a distinct community of river sailors along the Dnipro. Lucas: If you've been following these conversations about Catherine and Potemkin, you've probably noticed how much of it depends on ships and water — the Black Sea coast, the Dnipro, the Don. Honestly, if today's deep dive into the Dnipro Flotilla was worth a coffee to you, that's the link: buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small ask, but it helps keep these episodes ad-free and allows us to cover niche topics like this one. Luna: Yeah, it really does make a difference. And it lets us go deeper into these forgotten corners of history. Lucas: So back to the water: one of the most dramatic moments for the flotilla came in 1788, during the siege of Ochakiv. A detachment of chaiky under the command of a Greek privateer named Lambros Katsonis raided the Ottoman supply lines near the Danube, capturing several ships and forcing the Ottoman fleet to withdraw. Katsonis later became a kind of folk hero in Greece, but he started his career on the Dnipro. Luna: And the flotilla itself — did it survive into the 19th century? Lucas: In a sense, yes. The Dnipro Flotilla was formally disbanded after the Treaty of Jassy in 1792, but its ships were absorbed into the Black Sea Fleet. The riverine tradition lived on in the Danube Flotilla, which Russia maintained through the 19th century. And during World War II, the Soviet Dnipro Flotilla was revived one more time, using many of the same anchorages and routes that Catherine's flotilla had used. Lucas: So the Dnipro Flotilla is a thread that runs from the Cossack era to the Soviet era, connecting Peter the Great's first galleys to Stalin's river monitors. It's a reminder that Russia's power projection has always depended on its rivers — and on the ingenuity of the people who built the boats. Luna: It makes you wonder what other river flotillas are waiting to be rediscovered.