On April 26, 1881, crews belonging to the highest ranks of the Naval and Military Departments began arriving at the front entrance of the Admiralty, located on the Neva near Palace Square. Somewhat later than the others, the carriage of Alexei Alexandrovich himself, the admiral general who patronized the entire Russian Imperial Fleet, stopped at the gate. The importance of the upcoming meeting was obvious. For several years now, one after another, reports from naval agents (in modern parlance, attachés) stationed in various countries have been deposited on the desks of senior dignitaries. And if reports from America, Japan, Spain and Italy aroused rather abstract interest, and from England and France only purely technical interest, then reports from Germany were more and more disturbing from a strategic point of view. All the reports of the naval agent in Germany, Lieutenant Dozhirov, went directly to the desk of the head of the Naval Ministry, the Admiral General, and even Emperor Alexander II himself, whose life was so tragically cut short just a month before the meeting. Note. OCR: Sections with old style (pre-revolutionary) text are approximately preserved.