Nikolai Klado

Born 1862; died July 10, 1919, in Petrograd. Russian naval theorist and historian, rear admiral (1912); professor.

Klado graduated from the Naval School in 1881 and from the Nikolai Naval Academy in 1886, taught naval history and tactics at the Naval School from 1886 to 1888 and from 1892 to 1895, and served in a squadron of the Pacific Ocean from 1889 to 1892. He became an instructor of the art of naval warfare at the Naval Academy in 1895. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 he was chief of a department of the staff of the Pacific Fleet. Ordered into retirement in May 1905 for the publication of critical articles, such as “After the Retreat of the Second Squadron of the Pacific Ocean” (1905), Klado was appointed professor of the subdepartment of strategy of the Naval Academy in 1910 and was the coauthor and coeditor of Military Encyclopedia and History of the Russian Army and Navy. He was chief of the Naval Academy from March 1917 to July 1919. Klado advocated the bourgeois conception of the mastery of the sea (naval supremacy).