Peter the Great’s visit to England in 1698 had many consequences; one of the best for Russia was the acquisition of the British naval skill set. The Emperor was eager to improve his own navy and recruited officers and men, shipwrights, gun makers, mathematicians (to teach navigation) and engineers. One of his chief finds was the hydraulic engineer John Perry, who already had two dry docks under his belt, at Portsmouth and Flushing, and whom the Emperor recruited for naval projects. Perry negotiated a salary of £300, expenses and bonuses for each completed project and set off for St Petersburg in April 1698.

His first project was to build a canal between the Volga and Don at Astrakhan (a project which ground to a halt in 1701 at the advent of war), followed by major improvements to the dry dockage at Voronezh (one of Russia’s major southern towns, on the river of the same name, which is a tributary of the Don, and thus a route to the Black Sea) and to the capacity of the rivers to carry larger ships. He left under a cloud in 1712, having failed to obtain any of his pay or benefits, blocked at every turn by old-fashioned bureaucracy.