HMS Royal Sovereign was a British battleship, the keel of which was laid in 1914, launched in April 1915, and commissioned in the Royal Navy in April 1916. The total length of the ship was 189 m, width 27 m, and a full displacement of 31,200 tons. The maximum speed of the battleship Royal Sovereign was around 21-22 knots. The main armament at the time of the launch was eight 381 mm guns in four twin turrets. The secondary armament is 14 152 mm guns in casemates, 2 76 mm guns, 4 47 mm salute cannons (so-called pom-poms) and 4 533 mm torpedo tubes.
HMS Royal Sovereign was one of five Revenge-class battleships. Battleships of this type were built just before the outbreak of World War I, as a British response to the rapid naval armament of the Second German Reich. The plans for other British battleships - the Queen Elizabeth class - were largely modeled on. Revenge ships, however, had better armor with the same main and additional armament, which, in combination with a weaker engine room, resulted in a drop in speed - from about 25 knots in the Queen Elizabeth type to about 21-22 knots. In the interwar period, the Revenge-class battleships underwent only minor modernization: the anti-aircraft artillery and armor were marginally strengthened, and in 1939 they were to be withdrawn from service for the new King George V-class ships. HMS Royal Sovereign was built at Dockyard in Portsmouth. From the moment of entering service, it was part of the Grand Fleet, but did not have time to take part in the Battle of Jutland in 1916. For the rest of World War I, he did not enter into any serious combat contact with German ships. In the period 1922-1939 he served both in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Mediterranean Sea. From the end of August 1939, he served in the Home Fleet and operated in the North Sea and the North Atlantic. In May 1940, he was transferred to the Mediterranean Sea, based in Alexandria. After a short service in the cover of convoys in the Atlantic in 1941, in early 1942 he went to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific to fight the Japanese. At the end of that year, it was briefly transferred to Philadelphia in the USA for renovation and modernization, where it returned from March to September 1943. In 1944, the ship returned to Great Britain. In the same year, he was handed over to the USSR, where he served under the name Arkhangelsk until 1945.