tive. Yet shipments of weapons from the Allies, together with the vast reserves of Russian manpower should be sufficient, the czar and his advisers believed, to put up a credible showing against the Central Powers. If Germany and Austria were quickly defeated, Russia might gain its longtime objective of security on its southern frontier with Turkey. When Turkey joined the Central Powers and the Allies promised to support Russia in its goals to gain control of the Bosporus, it appeared Russia would achieve some long-standing aspirations.
With Germany engaged with France, and Austria struggling to suppress Serbia, each of the Central Powers would be at the disadvantage of fighting on two fronts. Geographically, it made good sense, as Russian troops could push into the East Prussian province of Germany from Russian Poland. Looked at from a simple strategic or geopolitical viewpoint, the alliance of Russia with France and Britain against the German Empire appeared brilliant.
The czar and his advisers could make a similar evaluation regarding the Aus- tro-Hungarian Empire. Germany’s Habsburg ally controlled restless populations of Ukrainians and Poles in Bukovina and Galicia, frontier provinces directly on the doorstep of Russia. With a rapid push through these provinces into the Car- pathian Mountains, Russian armies could come to the aid of Serbia by threaten- ing the heartland of Austria-Hungary itself. The prospects for an early victory, in Russian eyes, seemed imminent.
However, the Russian generals and aristocrats, like their counterparts in the rest of Europe, had very little understanding of the many ways in which warfare had changed. They predicted victory based on the outmoded and faulty premise of simple calculations of available manpower and distances to be traversed, mak- ing the sort of Napoleonic-era calculations common among their counterparts in the west.
Just as in Germany, France, and Britain, millions of Russian volunteers offered their services to the army, and the politically divided country appeared united and ready for a patriotic war. Even the socialists, including the Menshevik wing of the Social Democrats and both the Right and Left Social Revolutionaries, joined in endorsing the war against the Central Powers. Only the Bolsheviks pro- tested. They reluctantly followed the advice of Lenin from exile to oppose going to war. He believed that all working people in Russia should join with their brothers in the Central Powers in resisting the war, in a socialist-led front against the capitalist powers. However, Lenin’s cry for class solidarity in the face of the war met no response either in Russia or among socialists in Germany. Russian liberals, other socialists, and of course conservatives widely decried Lenin and his followers for lack of patriotism in time of war. Some accused Lenin of working as a German agent. Meanwhile peasants, workers, and the middle class thronged into army recruiting offices.
In spite of Russian popular optimism, the war turned out to be neither short nor easy. For the Russian people, World War I and its aftermath of continuing armed conflict brought immense tragedy in loss of life on land and sea, of men wounded in battle, and in those held prisoners of war by the enemy. Russia suf- fered some 8 million casualties when all these categories are considered together. Many of the battles and much of the devastation of homes, farms, businesses, and factories of World War I took place on lands that had long been part of the Russian Empire, including the Kingdom of Poland, White Russia, and Ukraine, all of which lay under the rule of the czar.
World War I brought fundamental changes to Russia in politics and social structure. As in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, the war broke apart the Russian Empire and destroyed it as a political entity. After the war, parts of the former Russian Empire immediately emerged as independent coun- tries: Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland. Yet the changes ran deeper than mere territorial loss. The war in Russia ended the regime of the czars and contributed to the formation of a government after November 1917 dominated by the Bolsheviks. The story of World War I on the eastern front for this reason is much more than an account of armed clashes but runs far deeper, to culminate in a rapid social and political transformation, characterized by American eyewitness John Reed as “Ten Days that Shook the World.”
BATTLES 1914–1916
Following the battles across the face of eastern Europe is made difficult for the modern student of the subject, because the boundaries of the various countries in eastern Europe have changed several times over the decades since the war. Frequently a city or fortress located in the provinces of Russian Poland, White Russia, or Ukraine in World War I is now found under a new national jurisdic- tion. Many cities and provinces have different names than they had then. Rus- sian troops moved first into the German province of East Prussia, located now in the northeastern region of Poland and in the Russian province of Kaliningrad Oblast, geographically separate from the rest of Russia.
Two Russian armies, expecting a quick victory, marched from Russian Poland into German East Prussia. The First Army made a strong advance across what is now the border between Lithuania and the Kaliningrad Oblast toward the city of Kaliningrad, then known as Koenigsberg. The German forces fell back in August, yielding German territory to this first success. Farther to the south,
While the front lines mutinied and the capital seethed with riots, life in Yaroslav, Russia, went on as before. (Library of Congress)
the Russian Second Army took up positions near the town of Tannenberg inside East Prussia after meeting light resistance. Although the territorial gains in East Prussia represented only a small advance in the estimation of Britain and France, the rapid Russian offensive drew off German troops, in effect saving Paris from the German onslaught in the west in the first weeks of the war.
Although it cost valuable resources Germany would have preferred to pour into Belgium and France on the western front, German commanders rapidly moved forces by rail to Tannenberg where they drove back the Russians in an extended battle, August 26–30. A week later, the Battle of Masurian Lakes drove the Russian First Army back across the frontier, there marked by the Nieman River. By mid-September, the Russian invasion of East Prussia had come to an ignominious end. The Germans took more than 90,000 Russian prisoners. Gen- eral Alexander Samsonov, commander of the Russian Second Army, retreating on foot with his troops, became lost in the woods on the retreat, and then, by some accounts, committed suicide on August 29.
Farther to the south, Russian forces advanced into the province of Bukovina, now in the nation of Ukraine, but then a frontier province of the Austro-Hun- garian Empire, running along the Carpathian Mountains that presented a barrier to invasion into Hungarian-ruled Transylvania. The Russian forces threatened to advance through the Carpathians into those lands at the core of the Austro- Hungarian Empire. In another advance, the Russians besieged an Austrian-held fortress city at Przemysl, now on the Polish side of the southern border with
Austrian prisoners were taken to the rear and housed well behind Russian lines in rough structures like this A-frame. (Library of Congress)
Ukraine. Cut off from Austrian supply lines, the defenders and citizens, mostly sympathetic to the Russians, began to starve before finally capitulating.
German and Austrian forces mounted a counterattack in early October that drove the Russians back through Russian Poland toward the Vistula River, with the Germans driving toward Warsaw itself. In southern Poland through Novem- ber and December, the Russians held back the Austrian advance at Cracow, although the Germans took the city of Lodz in Poland, about 60 miles southeast of Warsaw.
By the end of 1914, German forces had pushed Russian troops well back into Russian Poland, halting the threat to the eastern German province of Silesia; farther south, the Austrians held a line against the Russians in the Carpathian Mountains between Galicia and Hungarian Czech lands. That line held through the 1914–15 winter, and the Russians did not attempt to pass through the Carpathians until March 1915. By the end of April 1915, the Russian advance ground to a stop. Meanwhile, in the winter months of February and March, the Germans advanced to take the Baltic coastal city of Memel, in what is now Lithuania. After bitter back and forth fighting, the Germans gained Memel by the end of March and then made further advances into Lithuania.
By the summer of 1915, the Germans and Austrians began a gradual advance, pushing back the Russian troops first in Galicia and southern Poland. By the end of June, Austrians had regained control over their provinces of Galicia and Bukovina. They recaptured the fortress at Przemysl and moved on to the city of Lemberg (now L’vin) in Russian Ukraine. In a major offensive, German and Austrian troops continued to push forward. By August, they had taken Warsaw and, by the end of the month, moved on to Brest-Litovsk in eastern Poland (now right on the border between Poland and Belarus). With these advances, the Central Powers had moved well into the Russian Empire by fall 1915.
With these events, even ordinary citizens in Russia realized that the empire would have no easy victories, that the officers gave poor leadership, and that the Central Powers by contrast had well-organized and determined forces. In September 1915 Czar Nicholas II relieved his nephew, Grand Duke Nicholai, of command of the Russian military. The czar took over the position of min- ister of war for the remainder of his reign. Like his nephew, however, the czar faced problems of troop morale, supply, and lack of imagination and experience among officers that he could not do very much about. By the end of September the Germans had moved well into Lithuania. German forces controlled a line running north and south between the cities of Minsk and Pinsk in Belarus; the line continued southward under Austrian control, taking in almost all of Galicia, including the city of Czernowitz in the Ukraine.
After the Battle of Tannenberg in the first month of the war, the front had moved slowly to the east. Compared to the western front that remained stalemated in a narrow band stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland, the eastern front showed a gradual wearing down of the Russian forces and the loss of territory to the Central Powers. Even though the defense had a natural advantage under the conditions of World War I combat, with trenches, strong points, and machine guns holding the line against artillery bombardment and marching troops armed only with rifles and grenades, the defense could hold only if well-supplied with ammunition and manned by willing troops. However,
Russia remained plagued with incompetent officers leading dispirited troops who lacked weapons and ammunition.
Russian factories could not produce modern weapons, and, with the only access for Allied shipments through the ports of Murmansk and Archangel fro- zen in during the winter, weapons from the west could not augment the meager Russian supply. Efforts to modernize the Russian arms industry proceeded, but slowly and with very meager results.
Nicholas appointed the one officer with a record of success, General A. Brusilov, as commander of the forces on the Russian Southern Front, in April 1916. In a last push forward, known as the June Offensive or the Brusilov Offen- sive, Russian troops spent the summer of 1916 in an attempt to retake Lemberg in the Ukraine and Lublin in Poland. Before their advance stopped, some in the west took encouragement, believing that the tide had turned on the eastern front. Brusilov’s forces regained some lost ground in Galicia.
Whole units of Czech troops in the Austro-Hungarian army deserted to the Russian side. Not a huge army by the standards of the day, nevertheless, the Czech Legion of experienced and dedicated soldiers, numbering about 50,000, represented an impressive addition to Allied strength. Furthermore, under Brusi- lov’s command, the Russian forces took more than 350,000 prisoners, mostly from the Austro-Hungarian forces. As a consequence of the Russian successes against the Austrians, the Germans convinced the Austro-Hungarian officers to accept a unified command under German control, noted with some satisfaction by General Erich von Ludendorff.
In Russia at the end of 1916, the leadership still believed that, if they held their line, with an eventual Allied victory, Russia would emerge with territorial gains and access to the Mediterranean through the Bosporus and Dardanelles,
The Kaiser (center) consults with Paul von Hindenburg (left) and Erich von Ludendorff (right) beneath trophies at a hunting lodge. They agree that the Austro- Hungarian forces should come under German control. (National Archives)
as promised by the British in their secret treaty. However, the Brusilov offensive cost the Russians more than a million casualties and made only modest advances toward its objectives. Although the Russian army had suffered severe casualties, as yet no major mutinies among the troops had erupted. The Russian military position had grown difficult, but not desperate.
Brusilov moved the battle lines back somewhat to the west. Encouraged by the Russian advances, Allied promises of support, and pledges to endorse the acquisition of the territory of Transylvania from Austria-Hungary, Romania joined the Allies in August 1916. At first the Romanian forces advanced and took the city of Sibiu in Transylvania, but, by September, Austrian forces sur- rounded the advanced salient of Romanian troops there. To add to these prob- lems faced by Romania, its southern neighbor, Bulgaria, a member of the Central Powers since October 1915, had designs on Romanian territory. Even though French and British forces withdrawn from Gallipoli assembled at Salonika to threaten Bulgaria from the south, they made no advance. Soon the Central Pow- ers nearly overran Romania, with German and Bulgarian forces moving through the Romanian coastal lands on the Black Sea and taking most of the province of Dobrudja. By November, German forces advanced on the Romanian capital, which the Romanian government abandoned in December, taking refuge in the provincial town of Jassy near the Russian border.