Novgorod () was a monitor built for the Imperial Russian Navy in the 1870s. She was one of the most unusual warships ever constructed, and still survives in popular naval myth as one of the worst warships ever built. However, a more balanced assessment shows that she was relatively effective in her designed role as a coast-defence ship. The hull was circular to reduce draught while allowing the ship to carry much more armour and a heavier armament than other ships of the same size. Novgorod played a minor role in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and was reclassified as a coast-defence ironclad in 1892. The ship was decommissioned in 1903 and used as a storeship until she was sold for scrap in 1911. Background In 1868, the Scottish shipbuilder John Elder published an article that advocated that widening the beam of a ship would reduce the area that needed to be protected and allow it to carry thicker armour and heavier, more powerful guns in comparison to a ship with a narrower beam, as was the typical practice of the day. In addition such a ship would have a shallower draught and only a moderate increase in power would be required to match the speed of a normal ship. Sir Edward Reed, then Director of Naval Construction of the Royal Navy, agreed with Elder's conclusions. Rear-Admiral Andrei Alexandrovich Popov of the Imperial Russian Navy further expanded on Elder's concept by broadening the ship so that it was actually circular and he made the design flat-bottomed, unlike Elder's convex hull, to minimise its draught. Popov designed Novgorod to meet an 1869 requirement to defend the Dnieper-Bug Estuary and the Kerch Strait. The requirement was for four very heavily-armoured ships of draught and armed with rifled guns, for which the total programme cost should not exceed four million rubles. The met all of the requirements except that their armament was not powerful enough, so General-Admiral Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich selected Popov's circular design in late December 1869. A model was built with a circular hull and performed well during tests in the Baltic Sea at St. Petersburg in April 1870; when Tsar Alexander II received reports of the trials, he nicknamed the ship a "popovka", a diminutive form of the designer's name. Popov submitted several designs to the General-Admiral who selected the largest of these for a ship that displaced ,