Saint Fyodor Ushakov

Admiral Fyodor Fyodorovich Ushakov was an Imperial Russian Navy officer best known for his service in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. He won every engagement he participated in as the admiral of the Russian fleet. Ushakov was born in the village of Burnakovo in the Yaroslavl province, Moscow Gubernia, to a modest family of the minor nobility. His father, Fyodor Ignatyevich Ushakov, was a retired sergeant of the Preobrazhensky Regiment of the Russian Imperial guards. By the time Fyodor Ushakov submitted his statement of background (skaska) to the military, his family had not been officially confirmed in the so-called 'dvoryanstvo', yet they surely belonged to serving gentry. In the submission Ushakov stated that he neither had a coat-of-arms, nor a royal patent for a landed estate, and had no way to prove nobility. In 1798, Ushakov, as a vice-admiral of the Black Sea Fleet, submitted a request for official nobility and an arms providing a genealogical record. In 1807 his coat-of-arms was added to the General all-Russian book heraldry. In 1815 Fyodor Ushakov and his family were added to the part 6 (ancient nobility) of the Yaroslavl genealogical book. On 15 February 1761, he signed up for the Imperial Russian Navy in Saint Petersburg. After training, he served on a galley in the Baltic Fleet. In 1768 he was transferred to the Don Flotilla (Azov Flotilla) in Taganrog, and served in the Russo-Turkish War (1768–74). He commanded Catherine II's own yacht, and was active in protecting Russian merchant ships in the Mediterranean during the First League of Armed Neutrality. After the Russian Empire conquered the Crimean Khanate in 1783, Ushakov personally supervised the construction of a naval base in Sevastopol and the building of docks in Kherson. During the Russo-Turkish War (1787–92), he defeated the Ottomans at Fidonisi under Marko Voinovich's leadership (1788), the Kerch Strait (1790), Tendra (1790), and Cape Kaliakra (1791).