the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The crew of , as had been renamed in 1917, voted to turn her over to the Germans. They were only able to make one training cruise before they had to turn her over to the victorious Allies in 1918 as part of the armistice terms. The British took control of her, but turned her over to the White Russians in 1920 who renamed her . She only had one operable gun turret by this time and she provided some fire support for the Whites, but it was not enough. They were forced to evacuate the Crimea later that year and sailed for Bizerte where she was interned by the French. She was eventually scrapped there during the 1930s to pay her docking fees. Imperator Nikolai I Imperator Nikolai I ( or Emperor Nikolai I) was built during World War I for service in the Black Sea. She was designed to counter the multiple Ottoman orders for dreadnoughts which raised the possibility that the Russian dreadnoughts being built for the Black Sea Fleet could be out-numbered. The ship used the same main armament as the preceding , but was larger and more heavily armored. Imperator Nikolai I was launched in 1916, but construction was suspended on 24 October 1917. The Soviets considered completing her in 1923, but rejected the idea. She was towed to Sevastopol in 1927 and scrapped. Sovetsky Soyuz class The Sovetsky Soyuz-class battleships (Project 23, ), also known as "Stalin's Republics", were a class of battleships begun by the Soviet Union in the late 1930s but never brought into service. They were designed in response to the battleships being built by Germany. Only four hulls of the sixteen originally planned had been laid down by 1940, when the decision was made to cut the program to only three ships to divert resources to an expanded army rearmament program. These ships would have rivaled the Imperial Japanese in size if any had been completed, although with significantly weaker firepower: guns compared to the guns of the Japanese ships. The failure of the Soviet armor plate industry to build cemented armor plates thicker than would have negated any advantages from the Sovetsky Soyuz class's thicker armor in combat. Construction of the first four ships was plagued with difficulties as the Soviet shipbuilding and related industries were not prepared to build such large ships. One battleship,