The Aurora is a Pallada Class protected cruiser, laid down at the Admiralty Shipyard in Saint Petersburg on May 23rd, 1897 and commissioned on July 16, 1903. The Aurora, having taken 6 years to complete, was already obsolete by the time it entered the Russian Navy. Part of the First Cruiser Squadron at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, it was one of only a handful of Russian ships to survive the battle, the Captain having turned around and sailed to the Philippines once it became clear the situation was hopeless.

The Aurora underwent a refit after the Russo Japanese War and spent most of World War One shelling German lines along the Baltic Coast. In 1916, it was moored in Saint Petersburg for another major overhaul. In 1917, the Aurora played its most famous role. Having been seized by a group of revolutionary Bolshevik sailors, it fired the blank shell that signaled the storming of the Winter Palace in the October Revolution, essentially the first shot of the Russian Civil War, and the beginning of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the precursor to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

After the civil war, the Aurora served as a training ship for cadets, briefly seeing action in the Battle of Leningrad in 1941, shelling German positions while docked in harbor before being sunk by air attack. Because the Aurora was in a shallow location, she was raised and salvaged at the end of the war. The Aurora was finally decommissioned in 1948, and became a museum ship in 1956, a role which she fulfills today. Even though she is a museum ship, and almost 120 years old, she is the ceremonial Flagship of the Russian Navy, in the same way that HMS Victory is in the UK and USS Constitution is in the US. Today, the Aurora sits moored in the very spot it was in 1917, with the forward gun pointed at the Winter Palace.

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