23 Facts About Ivan Isakov

Ivan Isakov played a crucial role in shaping the Soviet Navy, particularly the Baltic and Black Sea flotillas during the Second World War.

Ivan Isakov was born Hovhannes Ter-Isahakyan in the family of an Armenian railway worker in the village of Hadjikend in the Kars Oblast, then a part of the Russian Empire.

Ivan Isakov's uncle had dreamed of service in the navy and had a library of marine literature, which inspired an identical love of watercraft for Isakov.

The family later moved to Tiflis, where he studied mathematics and engineering at the local realschule, which Ivan Isakov graduated from in 1913.

In 1917, Ivan Isakov moved to Petrograd and entered the Naval Guards School of the Imperial Russian Navy and graduated as a midshipman in March of that year.

Ivan Isakov briefly saw action against the Germans in West Estonian archipelago.

In March 1918, Ivan Isakov participated in the Ice Cruise of the Baltic Fleet from the naval base at Helsingfors where Russian warships and icebreakers were transferred from the Baltic to the naval base in Kronshtadt near Petrograd.

An authoritative Russian Navy source notes that Ivan Isakov completed additional courses in mine-sweeping and mine-laying in 1919 and then served in the Caspian Sea, returning to the Baltic in 1920 and subsequently serving in the Black Sea until the mid-1920s.

In 1920, Ivan Isakov was transferred and assigned to the destroyer Deyatelni, which patrolled from the Volga River down to the Caspian Sea and later shelled the positions of Allied interventionist forces in the midst of the Russian Civil War.

In 1928, Ivan Isakov completed academic courses at the Naval Academy in Leningrad and from 1930, he was Chief of Staff of the Baltic Fleet.

In 1932, Ivan Isakov became the professor and head of the naval art department of the Soviet Naval Military Academy and taught as a professor for five years until he was promoted commander of the Baltic Fleet.

Ivan Isakov was appointed vice-commissar of naval affairs, and in March 1939, he arrived in New York City on the RMS Aquitania, leading a naval delegation to the United States with the goal of purchasing new warships.

Ivan Isakov met with the Secretary of the Navy, but the delegation left empty-handed due to a multitude of factors.

Ivan Isakov broke away from teaching with the onset of the Winter War and entered active service; he coordinated not only the movement of naval warships in the Baltic Sea but the ground forces of the Red Army in the Soviet war against Finland.

From 1941 to 1943 Ivan Isakov was the chief of the Main Maritime Staff.

Nevertheless, Ivan Isakov temporarily served in the Soviet Red Banner Northern Fleet until 1942 when he became a commander in the North Caucasus Front, where German forces were attempting to penetrate the oil fields of Baku.

Ivan Isakov was responsible for the successful naval landing by Soviet forces on the Kerch peninsula, then held by German forces.

On 4 October 1942, Ivan Isakov was injured in a German bombing raid in Tuapse and had his foot amputated, spending the remainder of the war in a field hospital.

Nevertheless, Ivan Isakov continued to serve in his capacity as chief of staff of Soviet naval forces.

In March 1955, Ivan Isakov was promoted to the service rank of Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union, one of only three to hold that rank, but he managed to find the time for scholarly work.

Ivan Isakov received his Doktor nauk in 1937 after defending his dissertation on the routing of German forces by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Battle of Tsingtao in 1914.

In 1947, Ivan Isakov was appointed editor and president of The Atlas of the Sea, a three-volume work on the charting of naval routes, the mapping of the seafloor and the physical landscape of the oceans and the history of naval warfare.

Ivan Isakov became a member of the Writers' Union of the USSR in 1964.