first year of World War I, Andrei Pervozvanny and Imperator Pavel I comprised the battle core of the Baltic Fleet. For most of the war they remained moored in the safety of Sveaborg and Helsingfors. Idle, demoralized enlisted men subscribed to Bolshevik ideology and on took control of the ships in a violent mutiny. The battleships survived the Ice Cruise of 1918, and Andrei Pervozvanny later ruthlessly gunned down the Krasnaya Gorka fort mutiny of 1919. After the Kronstadt rebellion the Bolshevik government lost interest in maintaining the battleships, and they were laid up in November–December 1923. Dreadnoughts Gangut class The Gangut-class battleships were the first dreadnoughts built for the Imperial Russian Navy, begun before World War I. Their role was to defend the mouth of the Gulf of Finland against the Germans, who never tried to enter, so the ships spent their time training and providing cover for minelaying operations. Their crews participated in the general mutiny of the Baltic Fleet after the February Revolution in 1917, and joined the Bolsheviks the following year. The Russians were forced to evacuate their naval base at Helsinki after Finland became independent in December 1917. The Gangut-class ships led the first contingent of ships to Kronstadt even though the Gulf of Finland was still frozen. All of the dreadnoughts except for were laid up in October–November 1918 for lack of manpower. was severely damaged by a fire while laid up in 1919. Petropavlovsk was retained in commission to defend Kronstadt and Leningrad against the British forces supporting the White Russians although she also helped to suppress a mutiny by the garrison of Fort Krasnaya Gorka in 1919. Her crew, and that of , joined the Kronstadt Rebellion of March 1921. After it was bloodily crushed, those ships were given proper 'revolutionary' names. , the former Sevastopol, was modified in 1928 to improve her sea-keeping abilities so that she could be transferred to the Black Sea Fleet which had nothing heavier than a light cruiser available. This proved to be the first of a series of modernizations where each ship of the class was progressively reconstructed and improved. A number of proposals were made in the 1930s to rebuild , ex-Poltava, to match her sisters or even as a battlecruiser by removing one turret, but these came to naught and she was hulked preparatory to scrapping. The two ships of the Baltic Fleet