Gavriil

Gavriil

 

a destroyer in the Baltic Fleet, commissioned in October 1916. Water displacement was 1,260 tons and a speed of 65 km per hour (35 knots). The destroyer was armed with four 100-mm guns, two machine guns, three triple torpedo tubes, and 80 mines; and it had a crew of 150 men. The Gavriil participated in the Muhu Sound Operation of 1917 and in the heroic arctic campaign of the Baltic Fleet in 1918. In an unequal battle on May 18, 1919, it damaged four British destroyers. On June 4, 1919, with the destroyer Azard, it attacked and sank a British submarine in the Kopor’e Bay. On Aug. 18, 1919, while repelling a raid of British torpedo boats on Kronstadt, it destroyed three of them. The Gavriil exploded on Oct. 21, 1919, when it hit a mine in Kopor’e Bay; it sank with a large part of its crew and its commander V. V. Sevast’ianov and the commissar N. P. Lepeshkin.