Fyodor Vasilyevich Dubasov

Фёдор Васильевич Дубасов
Russian Empire Imperial establishment and White movement Russian Empire Russian 1845–1912 ○ Illness

Imperial Russian admiral who crushed the Moscow December uprising with artillery fire

'Dubasov himself declared that of the fifteen thousand men of the Moscow garrison, only five thousand were reliable': Lenin quoting Dubasov in 'Lessons of the Moscow Uprising'

A naval officer who earned the campaign's first St. George's Cross by sinking a Turkish ironclad with two mine boats in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, Dubasov later commanded the Pacific Squadron that occupied Port Arthur. Appointed Governor-General of Moscow in November 1905, he crushed the December armed uprising by shelling the barricades and deploying the Semyonovsky Guards, and frankly admitted, as Lenin quoted, that only five thousand of his fifteen-thousand-strong garrison were reliable. He survived two SR assassination attempts, but his injuries contributed to his death in 1912.

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After the Governorship: Naval Elder Statesman, 1906–1912

In July 1906, shortly after the assassination attempt, Dubasov was formally replaced as Governor-General of Moscow, and on 6 December of that year he was promoted to the rank of admiral while retaining his seat on the State Council, to which he had been appointed in January 1906. Politically he belonged to the State Council's "right group," and he worked actively in its Finance Commission on questions of naval development and the strengthening of Russia's defences. In December 1908 he received the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky.

In the military and policy sphere he took part, through the State Council and the Council of State Defence, in conferences that defined the "main principles of the shipbuilding programme" and in the review of designs for individual vessels, including new battleships. In August 1907 he sailed from Kronstadt to the Murman coast to examine the case for building a port there.

In the sphere of historical record, he was among those who initiated the historical commission set up to collect and study material on the fleet's actions during the Russo-Japanese War. He gave the commission a copy of his 1898 memorandum setting out his views on the occupation of Port Arthur and the advantages he saw in basing the fleet at Mozampo, and in 1910 he submitted a collection of documents drawn from his official correspondence as commander of the Pacific Squadron with the Naval Ministry, his subordinate flag officers, ship commanders, and diplomatic representatives in the Far East. The commission published his collection, supplemented by other materials, in 1912. His earlier opposition to Port Arthur as a fleet base thus became part of the documentary record after his death.

In his final years his health was gravely undermined by the wounds of the assassination attempts; after a long period of treatment abroad he returned to Saint Petersburg. He died in that city in 1912, three days before his sixty-seventh birthday, from the after-effects of the injuries he had received in the attacks of 1906 and 1907, and was buried in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. His last major undertaking was active participation in building the Church of the Saviour on the Waters in Saint Petersburg, a memorial to the sailors killed at Port Arthur and Tsushima. During the First World War a destroyer of the Novik class, the Leytenant Dubasov, was laid down for the Baltic Fleet at the Putilov yard; the events of 1917 prevented its completion, and his grave has not survived either.

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