Russian Hydrographic Service
organization
The Russian Hydrographic Service (Russian: Гидрографическая служба России, Gidrograficheskaya sluzhba Rossii), officially the Department of Navigation and Oceanography of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, is the hydrographic office of Russia responsible to for operating lighthouses, facilitating navigation, performing hydrographic surveys and publishing nautical charts. It is formally a department of the Ministry of Defence and a unit of the Russian Navy. Its headquarters are located in Saint Petersburg.
The Hydrographic Service was established in 1777 during the expansion of the Imperial Russian Navy but can trace its origins to the time of Tsar Peter the Great in the late 17th century. It has been historically attached to the Russian Navy, and the agents and supervisors of hydrographic works have been largely naval officers throughout its history. Its surveying has been indispensable due to vast size of Russia and its nature that it includes many different seas, long and indented coastlines and a great number of islands, as well as a complex system of waterways and lakes.
The Russia Hydrographic Service is a member of the International Hydrographic Organization.
Competences and functions
Despite having undergone a number of name changes along its history, the main functions of the Hydrographic Service of the Russian Navy have been quite consistently the following:
Providing specific services to the Navy, including other branches of the Russian Armed Forces, related to the Russian maritime and coastal areas, as well as navigable inland waters. These services are of a strategic order and encompass the following fields:
Navigation and hydrography.
Hydrometeorology
Surveys
Navigation and hydrographic support of maritime activities within Russian waters and implementation of the international Safety of Life at Sea Convention regulations in the waters under Russian jurisdiction.
“Russian Hydrographic Service” enters the record as organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Russian, Hydrographic and Service can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Russian Hydrographic Service” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Russian, Hydrographic and Service provides the most credible route into that argument.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16636713. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1777.
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This entry incorporates text from “Russian Hydrographic Service” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.