Russian monitor Smerch  Smerch () was a monitor built for the Imperial Russian Navy in the early 1860s. She was designed by the British shipbuilder Charles Mitchell and built in Saint Petersburg. The ship spent her entire career with the Baltic Fleet. She ran aground and sank shortly after she entered service in 1865. "Smerch" was refloated and repaired shortly afterwards. She became a training ship sometime after 1892 and was stricken from the Navy List in 1904. The ship was hulked five years later and renamed "Blokshiv No. 2". She was in Finland when that country declared its independence in 1918, but was returned to the Soviets after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed. "Blokshiv No. 1", as the ship was now known, was sunk by German artillery fire in 1941. She was salvaged the following year and remained in service until she was stricken in 1959 and subsequently broken up. The Russian Admiralty Board had previously licensed the design of the from the United States and wished to compare the John Ericsson-designed gun turrets of those ships with the turrets designed by the British inventor Captain Cowper Coles. The board therefore commissioned Mitchell to design a twin-turret monitor based on the and to build it in the shipyard that he had modernized for the board in Saint Petersburg, Russia. "Smerch" was long at the waterline. She had a beam of and a maximum draft of . The ship was designed to displace , but turned out to be overweight and actually displaced . "Smerch" was fitted with a double bottom that could be flooded in combat to reduce her freeboard. Her crew numbered 11 officers and 122 enlisted men in 1867 and 12 officers and 143 crewmen in 1875. She had a freeboard of only and her deck was often awash in any sort of moderate sea. "Smerch" rolled heavily and was fitted with three telescoping iron pole masts, probably fore-and-aft rigged, that were used to steady the ship rather than for propulsion. The ship had two simple horizontal direct-acting steam engines, built by Maudslay, Sons and Field of London. The engines had a bore of and a stroke of and each drove a single propeller. Steam was provided by three rectangular fire-tube boilers at a pressure of . The engines produced a total of which gave "Smerch" a maximum speed of about when she ran her sea trials from 12 to 17 June 1865.