author
Evgenii Sigizmundovich Politovskii
1874–1905
A naval engineer caught inside one of the Russo-Japanese War’s most fateful voyages, he left behind vivid letters that read like both travel diary and eyewitness history. His writing brings the long journey to Tsushima close and human.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in Tashkent in 1874, Evgenii Sigizmundovich Politovskii was a Russian naval engineer. He came from the family of a Polish exile, studied in the Russian Empire’s naval engineering system, and served with the fleet during the years leading up to the Russo-Japanese War.
He is best known for the letters that became From Libau to Tsushima, an account of Admiral Rozhestvensky’s long voyage to the Far East. Written from aboard the flagship Knyaz Suvorov, these pages combine technical observation, daily detail, and the strain of life at sea, which gives the book much of its immediacy.
Politovskii died in 1905 during the Battle of Tsushima. Because his book grew from personal letters written during the expedition itself, it remains valuable not just as military history, but as a direct, human record of a disastrous campaign.