in September 1893, but they were not completed until the middle of 1895. In 1905, Georgii Pobedonosets briefly joined the Potemkin mutiny. On 29 June 1905, the ship was one of eight vessels (three battleships, a cruiser and four torpedo boats) sent to capture the in Odessa. The next day the fleet approached Potemkin, then suddenly retreated. She then followed them, deliberately goading the officers to order the sailors to fire on their comrades. The crew of Georgii Pobedonosets refused: "We won't fire! We won't man the guns! We refuse to engage the Potemkin." Her sailors cheered the rebel sailors' bravery. Dorofey Koshuba, a member of the revolutionary sailors' organisation Tsentralka, broke into the armoury, ordered Captain Ilya Guzevich to halt the ship, pushing him away when he refused. The ship halted, Guzevich pleaded with the sailors to go to Sevastopol, even offering to let the 70 revolutionaries onto Potemkin. Afanasi Matushenko, the leader of Potemkins crew, arrived with several revolutionaries who made a speech that inspired the sailors to arrest the officers. This was enough to make his second-in-command, Lieutenant Grigorkov, commit suicide. Apart from this, the seizure was bloodless. The sailors elected a committee (Koshuba and nine others), locked the officers in the stateroom and ripped off their epaulettes. The officers were put ashore in Odessa. It was decided that the petty officers should be put ashore too the next day. Senior Boatswain A. O. Kuzmenko became captain. The next day, however, loyal crew members regained control of the ship and they ran her aground and surrendered to the authorities. In August 1905, 75 mutineers were tried. Koshuba and two others were executed and 19 sailors got 185 years of hard labour. In 1907, the Naval General Staff made a proposal for a radical reconstruction that was similar to the proposals to reconstruct and made before the Russo-Japanese War that involved cutting her down by one deck and replacing her armament with two twin-gun turrets equipped with 12-inch 40-calibre guns and the compound armor replaced by Krupp armor. This new proposal differed from the older one in that eight guns replaced the ten six-inch guns originally planned. This was rejected as she still would have lacked the speed to stay with the main fleet and the hull protection required to withstand high-explosive shell fire. She became a training ship in 1908 and her 6-inch 35-calibre guns were replaced