Black walls of the legendary Fort Emperor Alexander I
overlook the Gulf of Finland near St. Petersburg.
This fortress never had a chance to fight a battle,
but it was on the front line of a war,
a war against a most devastating enemy—the plague.
Just one and a half centuries ago, neither high walls nor prayers
could save people from this terrible disease.
Millions of lives were being lost.
In the late 19th century, another epidemic broke out in southern Russia.
Here, behind the walls of Fort Alexander,
researchers of the Special Antiplague Laboratory
started their battle against this deadly disease.
Isolated from the whole world,
they were developing and producing vaccines against plague, cholera, and typhus,
which saved thousands of lives.
However, initially, this fortification near Kronstadt
had a different purpose.
It's a classic casemated naval fort of the era
when smoothbore artillery was at its peak.
The famous French Fort Boyard was later built following the same principle.
Fort Alexander protected the southern fairway of the Kronstadt Roadstead.
Each floor in the fort resembled a deck of a ship of the line,
built one on top another.
From a bird's eye view, this fortress, which was bristling with cannons,
looked quite menacing at the time.
So, let's fly!
Naval Fortress
The flooding of November 7, 1824,
destroyed virtually all earth and timber fortifications
and pile-supported forts of Kronstadt.
Laid down as far back as the early 18th century,
Forts Kronshlot and Citadel were in a miserable state.
St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire,
stood virtually unprotected from the sea.
Emperor Nicholas I decided not just to restore these fortresses,
but to rebuild them in stone.
He believed that Kronstadt, as the key to the capital and the base
for Russia’s Baltic Fleet,
should become a most powerful naval fortress,
whose very look would repel the enemies.
It would’ve been too expensive to build a large fort,
because the basement is immensely expensive here.
Only for the load-bearing structures, more than 5,000 piles were driven in,
while their total number exceeds 8,000.
So you realize how expensive this is.
Therefore, the most cost efficient, cheap, quick, and simple way
was to build several decks and equip them with cannons.
That way you get a pretty good density of fire.
So they decided to build this powerful tower with three,
even four floors and 137 guns, which together with Fort Paul
could fire through the Big Kronstadt Roadstead.
Fort Emperor Alexander I, which defended the southern fairway,
is located 240 meters to the west from the line between Forts Emperor Peter I
and Konstantin.
It is an oval 90 by 60 meters, stretching from north to south.
The fort’s brick casemates, covered with granite blocks,
had three decks on its frontal side;
the upper, fourth deck was an open one.
At the rear, eastern side, the casemates had
two decks, with loopholes at the bottom.
The entrance to the fort from the mooring was protected by a massive metal gate.
Inside the fort, you’d find two half-towers
with ladders and cannonball heating furnaces,
as well as two magazines.
Along its rear side, the fort had a three-story building with a kitchen,
forge, and watch room on the first floor,
and barracks for soldiers and officers on the second and third floors.
The fort’s armaments were more than serious.
Right here, they had four 333-mm mortars, which fired 80-kg rounds.
A bit further—here—they had a position for 273-mm Paixhans guns,
the most powerful cannons used by fortresses at the time.
And that’s just a small selection of all the fort’s weapons.
Fort Alexander was constructed when smoothbore artillery
was at the peak of its evolution.
New gunpowder types were being invented;
the guns were being improved— their range, power, ammunition.
On other floors, there were fifty 196-mm licornes,
and fifty more guns of other calibers.
The weight of a salvo from all the fort’s guns amounted to about 2.5 tons.
A well-positioned gun on the coast is worth an entire frigate.
The gun is standing on the ground, it’s standing rigidly;
here you have plenty of space in the casemates to operate the gun—
you can load and discharge it quickly.
It’s not like on a ship, where the decks are low, it’s pretty tight,
and there’s a risk of fire, since you have wood around you.
However, it’s worth mentioning that wooden ships weren’t the same in this regard.
Thus, some English ships had their sides up to 1.2 meters thick.
So a cannonball couldn’t penetrate them even in the case of point-blank fire.
In this room, they had cannonball heating furnaces.
During a battle, rounds were to be heated to a very high temperature here
before firing.
Why? The answer is simple:
when a cannonball like this hits a ship, it immediately causes fire aboard.
And just think of what would happen if a red-hot round
hit the ship’s gunpowder magazine.
A race was going on between attack weapons and defenses…
Cannons were forging ahead, even smoothbore guns were developing:
new ranges, new forces, new gunpowder types…
Ships were engaged not only with cannonballs,
but also bombs— mortars were installed here too.
Ships were also engaged with all kinds of curious, exotic rounds,
such as chain-shots.
These are two halves of a ball chained together,
intended to cut the ship’s rigging.
Since shrouds were used to hold the masts up,
if you managed to cut the shrouds, the ship couldn’t move.
By the summer of 1845, when Fort Emperor Alexander I was commissioned,
its combat positions were equipped with 123 guns:
thirty-two 152-mm cannons,
twenty 173-mm cannons,
four 152-mm carronades,
four 173-mm carronades,
fifty 196-mm licornes,
nine 273-mm Paixhans guns,
four 333-mm mortars.
The garrison was manned by 786 people.
The works were supervised on the highest level,
by Prince Alexander Sergeyevich Menshikov and Emperor Nicholas I himself.
Special attention was paid to the fortress’s embrasures.
Here you can see that an embrasure in the fort is all made of granite.
It consists of about 15 to 18 parts,
which are precisely fitted to one another.
These granite parts are designed in such a way
so that they press against each other,
and when an external force affects them,
its impact is distributed throughout the entire wall.
Later on, moorings were arranged at the fort
and a building for the barracks was completed.
Though the most important thing for any military installation
is its reliability and functionality,
Fort Alexander also had some beautiful decorations.
Look at this ladder.
This elegant, intricate design is rather typical for a bank
or a rich house in St. Petersburg, but in no way for a fortress.
The emperor was so impressed by its beauty that he ordered
special wooden shields be made
to cover the ladder during a battle.
When the fort was being commissioned,
of course, the emperor personally visited it
and inspected everything here.
And when he was aboard his yacht on the way back, the fort fired a salvo.
To be frank, I really wish I could see that.
By the way, the fort did fire its guns a number of times,
as they used to hold exercises for the whole fortress.
This must have been beautiful.
But unfortunately, we didn’t have a chance to see this and never will.
The chance to test the strength and firepower
of the new fortification occurred in 1853,
when the Crimean War broke out.
The main hostilities took place in the Black and Mediterranean Seas,
but soon the war reached the Kronstadt Roadstead—
the Anglo-French squadron approached St. Petersburg…
From secret sources, it became known
that the commander of the Anglo-French squadron, Admiral Napier,
was planning to send his small ships
for a dummy attack on Kronstadt from the north
and, making use of the turmoil, lead his main forces
through the southern fairway.
But Fort Emperor Alexander I was waiting for him there in full combat readiness.
Besides Alexander, the southern fairway was defended by Forts Kronshlot,
Emperor Peter I, and Emperor Paul I,
which was under construction.
Alexander’s mooring was disassembled to prevent the enemy
from deploying a ground force.
A minefield was laid between Forts Alexander and Paul—a total of 105 mines.
The Russian emperor achieved his goal:
Fort Alexander became the key element in the defense of St. Petersburg
from enemy ships,
and the adversary simply didn’t dare assault the Kronstadt Fortress.
In the second half of the 19th century,
smoothbore cannons were replaced by rifled artillery.
The guns’ range of fire increased,
so did the destructive power of the new rounds.
In this arms race, Fort Alexander suffered a devastating defeat.
It’s worth mentioning one experiment…
In Sweden, they have a fortress called Vaxholm.
It has about the same design as our Fort Alexander.
In the 1860s, the Swedes held an experiment:
a gunboat approached the fort at a distance of about 600–700 meters
and started firing at it.
At first, she was firing red-hot cast-iron cannonballs.
These rounds left 20–25-centimeter craters.
Then she began to fire a 9-inch rifled gun,
and with the third shot the round penetrated the wall—
this two-meter thick, brick wall covered with granite.
All forts suddenly became outdated.
It turned out that they were unable to resist the shells fired by rifled guns.
Engineers came up with a palliative solution, let’s call it so.
They proposed to put a meter-thick layer of sand on the roof
and cover it with a concrete pillow of about 70 centimeters to one meter thick.
Theoretically, this was sufficient to block one hit from a 9-inch shell.
But it turned out that this solution could not be implemented here.
The reason is that when Fort Alexander was constructed,
the bending of its vaults began to change,
they became lower.
And so Alexander’s vaults simply couldn’t hold this pillow.
In 1896, the fort was stricken from the military registry.
At that time, an epidemic of plague broke out in Russia.
The country was in great need of a laboratory
that could make antiplague vaccines.
And it was decided to use Fort Alexander for this purpose.
Its location was perfect for setting up a laboratory.
While previously the fort served as a reliable barrier
in the path of external adversaries,
now it was to contain a dangerous adversary within its walls.
The access to the fort was strictly limited.
All connections with the outside world were via a small steamer.
The researchers—probably, with some dark humor—called her Microbe.
Among ordinary people, the Plague Fort aroused true primal fear.
Citizens of Kronstadt even feared the winds blowing from the direction of the fort.
In Russia, it was the first laboratory, the only laboratory of the kind,
because one could work on such a dangerous agent as the plague
only here, in a safe place.
It was the third laboratory in the world by the number of serums
and other medicines produced.
And it supplied them all over the world.
This is what makes our fort remarkable.
It earned a reputation not through firing and killing people,
but through saving people.
A special station for preparing the antiplague vaccine
was launched in the fort in the summer of 1899.
Dozens of doctors were carrying out medical experiments in this lab—
risking their lives, completely isolated from the rest of the world.
Even despite stringent safety measures,
two outbreaks of plague took the lives of two doctors.
It must be mentioned that a huge number of people in our country today
owe their lives to this laboratory.
That’s because they all have grandparents and great-grandparents, who were at war
and, let’s say, other places with cholera outbreaks
(for example, the cholera epidemic in Odessa,
which was cured using the medicines produced here, in the Plague Fort).
So they owe their lives to this laboratory.
Fort Emperor Alexander I held important roles during its history.
It was a formidable gatekeeper that deterred attacks
with the demonstration of its granite embrasures;
and it was a healer who defeated the deadly disease.
Today, the fort’s role is simply to remain what it is:
an example of fortification art
and one of the most remarkable fortresses of Kronstadt.