Eastern Front (World War I)

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The Eastern Front (World War I) was the vast theatre of war fought between 1914 and 1918 across Eastern Europe, where the German Empire and Austria-Hungary faced the Russian Empire and, from 1916, Romania. It must not be confused with the Eastern Front of the Second World War, fought on much of the same ground between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941–1945. This article is about the First World War front only, and every date, commander and battle named here belongs to 1914–1918.

The Eastern Front (World War I) was unlike the Western Front. There were no continuous lines of trenches running from sea to sea. Instead, armies moved across enormous distances — from East Prussia and the Masurian Lakes in the north, through the Polish plains and the Carpathian Mountains, to Galicia, Romania and the Black Sea coast in the south. A single advance could cover hundreds of kilometres, and a single defeat could destroy an entire army. The front stretched for more than 1,600 kilometres at its longest, and the distances, the poor roads and railways, and the harsh winters shaped the fighting as much as any general’s plan.

The war in the east began in August 1914 with a Russian invasion of East Prussia that ended in disaster at Tannenberg, and it ended in March 1918 with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which revolutionary Russia left the war and ceded vast territories to the Central Powers.

In between came some of the largest battles of the First World War: the German-Austrian breakthrough at Gorlice-Tarnow in 1915, the great Russian retreat of that year, and the Brusilov Offensive of 1916, one of the most successful Allied offensives of the entire war. The Eastern Front (World War I) also had political consequences that the Western Front did not.

The strain of the war helped to bring down the Russian monarchy in 1917, opened the way to revolution and civil war, and redrew the map of Eastern Europe. When the fighting stopped, four empires — Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman — were gone or on the verge of collapse, and new states such as Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were emerging from the wreckage.

Key Facts

Item	Detail
Dates	17 August 1914 – 3 March 1918 (Treaty of Brest-Litovsk); Romania fought August 1916 – December 1917, then May 1918
Theater/Location	Eastern Europe: East Prussia, Poland, Galicia, the Baltic region, Ukraine, Romania, and the Carpathian Mountains
Result	Central Powers victory in the east; Russia left the war under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; the treaty was annulled by the Armistice of November 1918
Commanders	Germany: Paul von Hindenburg, Erich Ludendorff, August von Mackensen; Austria-Hungary: Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf; Russia: Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, Alexei Brusilov, Mikhail Alekseyev; Romania: King Ferdinand I, Alexandru Averescu
Strength	Russia mobilised roughly 12 million men during the war in total; Germany and Austria-Hungary committed several million men to the east at different times, with German strength in the east rising from about 500,000 in 1914 to well over 1 million by 1917
Losses	Estimates range from about 2 million to more than 3 million military dead on all sides on this front; total casualties, including wounded and prisoners, are estimated at 10 million or more; Russian military deaths alone are commonly estimated at 1.7 to 2.2 million

Background

The Alliance System and the War Plans of 1914

The Eastern Front (World War I) grew out of the alliance system that divided Europe before 1914. Germany and Austria-Hungary were bound by the Dual Alliance of 1879. France and Russia were bound by the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1892, and Britain was linked to both by the Entente agreements of 1904 and 1907.

When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, Russia mobilised in support of Serbia. Germany then declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914 and on France on 3 August, and invaded Belgium.

The war that followed was fought on two main fronts in Europe: the Western Front against France and Britain, and the Eastern Front (World War I) against Russia.

German war planning, associated with the Schlieffen Plan, assumed that Russia would mobilise slowly and that Germany could therefore defeat France quickly in the west before turning its full strength east. Russia was expected to need six weeks or more to bring its armies to the frontier. That assumption proved wrong.

Russia mobilised faster than German planners expected, and its armies crossed into East Prussia in mid-August 1914, only two weeks after the declaration of war. The Russian advance forced Germany to transfer troops from the west to the east at a critical moment, and it set the pattern for the whole Eastern Front (World War I): Russia could field enormous armies, but it struggled to supply, equip and command them, while Germany and Austria-Hungary, with shorter lines of communication and better railways, could move smaller forces quickly and strike hard at exposed flanks.

Austria-Hungary had its own problems. Its chief of staff, Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, planned simultaneous offensives against Serbia in the south and Russia in the east, with too few troops for either. The Austro-Hungarian army was a multi-national force, with German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Croat, Serb, Slovene and Italian soldiers, and it suffered from language difficulties, uneven training and a shortage of modern artillery and machine guns. In the first months of the war, Austria-Hungary lost hundreds of thousands of men in Galicia, and from 1915 onwards it depended increasingly on German help to hold its front.

Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Question of Poland and Galicia

The political stakes on the Eastern Front (World War I) were enormous. The borderlands between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia — East Prussia, Russian Poland, Galicia and Ukraine — had been contested for more than a century. Poland had been partitioned between the three empires in the eighteenth century and did not exist as an independent state in 1914.

Galicia, with its Polish and Ukrainian population, belonged to Austria-Hungary but was claimed by Russian nationalists. The Baltic provinces, Finland and Ukraine were part of the Russian Empire but contained peoples who hoped the war might bring them independence. Each side therefore fought not only for victory in battle but for the future control of these lands, and the promises made to Poles, Ukrainians, Finns and Baltic peoples during the war helped to shape the new states that emerged after 1918.

Russia entered the war with the largest army in Europe but with serious weaknesses. Its industry could not produce enough rifles, artillery shells, machine guns or railway wagons for a long war. By 1915, Russian soldiers were going into battle without rifles, expected to pick up the weapons of fallen comrades. Transport was poor, the officer corps was uneven, and the high command was divided by rivalry. Yet the Russian soldier was tough and enduring, the country was vast, and the army could absorb losses that would have destroyed a smaller state. The Eastern Front (World War I) therefore became a war of attrition on a continental scale, in which Russia’s manpower was matched against German organisation and firepower.

Opposing Forces

The Central Powers: Germany and Austria-Hungary

The German army on the Eastern Front (World War I) was commanded at first by Maximilian von Prittwitz, who was replaced after the Russian invasion of East Prussia by Paul von Hindenburg, with Erich Ludendorff as his chief of staff. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the victors of Tannenberg, became the dominant figures of the German war effort in the east, and from 1916 they effectively directed Germany’s whole war policy.

German forces in the east were organised into the Eighth Army in East Prussia, and later into larger army groups under Hindenburg, Mackensen and Prince Leopold of Bavaria. German troops were generally well trained, well equipped with artillery and machine guns, and supported by an excellent railway system that allowed rapid movement between sectors.

Austria-Hungary fielded large armies, but they were less well equipped and less cohesive than the German forces. Its armies in Galicia in 1914 numbered more than a million men, yet they lost heavily in the opening battles and never fully recovered their pre-war quality. After 1915, German officers and German divisions were increasingly attached to Austro-Hungarian formations, and joint German-Austrian offensives, such as Gorlice-Tarnow, were usually commanded by Germans. Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in October 1915 and helped to overrun Serbia, while the Ottoman Empire, which entered the war in November 1914, fought Russia separately in the Caucasus, a campaign that is usually treated as a separate theatre from the Eastern Front (World War I) itself.

Russia and Romania

The Russian army was organised into numbered armies, each of several corps. In August 1914, the First Army under Paul von Rennenkampf and the Second Army under Alexander Samsonov invaded East Prussia from different directions. They were supposed to converge on the German Eighth Army, but poor coordination, intercepted wireless messages sent in clear text, and personal rivalry between the two commanders allowed the Germans to defeat them separately. The Russian commander-in-chief at the start of the war was Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, the Tsar’s uncle. He was replaced in September 1915 by Tsar Nicholas II himself, a decision that tied the fate of the monarchy directly to the fortunes of the army and proved disastrous when defeats continued.

Russian forces were brave but poorly supplied. The army suffered chronic shortages of rifles, shells, boots, food and medical care. Its generals were often cautious and slow, its staff work was weak, and its communications depended on unencrypted radio that the Germans could read. Despite these handicaps, Russia produced able commanders.

Alexei Brusilov, who commanded the South-Western Front in 1916, was one of the most innovative generals of the war, and his offensive that year showed what the Russian army could achieve with careful preparation and surprise. Romania entered the war on the Allied side in August 1916, hoping to gain Transylvania from Austria-Hungary, but its army was poorly equipped and it was quickly overrun by a German-Austrian-Bulgarian counteroffensive.

Romania was forced to sign the Treaty of Bucharest in May 1918, although it re-entered the war on the last day of the conflict in November 1918.

The Eastern Front, 1914–1918

1914: Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes

The first campaign on the Eastern Front (World War I) was fought in East Prussia in August and September 1914. The Russian First Army under Rennenkampf crossed the frontier on 17 August and won a small victory at Gumbinnen on 20 August. The German commander, Prittwitz, panicked and ordered a retreat behind the Vistula, but he was dismissed and replaced by Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

The new commanders, helped by Colonel Max Hoffmann, realised from intercepted Russian wireless messages that the Russian First and Second Armies were advancing separately and out of contact with each other. They left a small screening force facing Rennenkampf and concentrated against Samsonov’s Second Army, which was advancing from the south through difficult forest and lake country.

The Battle of Tannenberg, fought from 26 to 30 August 1914, was one of the most complete victories of the war. German forces encircled the Russian Second Army, and Samsonov, seeing that his army was destroyed, took his own life in the forest. Russian losses are estimated at about 30,000 killed and wounded and more than 90,000 prisoners, together with hundreds of guns.

The battle was named Tannenberg by Hindenburg as a deliberate echo of the medieval Battle of Tannenberg of 1410, in which a German order had been defeated by Poles and Lithuanians; the name was propaganda, since the fighting took place some distance from the village itself.

A week later, at the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes in September 1914, the Germans drove Rennenkampf’s First Army back out of East Prussia. Russia had lost two armies, but it had succeeded in its strategic purpose: Germany had been forced to send troops east, and the German advance in the west was weakened at the moment of the Battle of the Marne.

Meanwhile, in the south, Austria-Hungary suffered a disaster in Galicia. Its armies invaded Russian Poland in August 1914 but were defeated in the Battle of Galicia, fought from late August to mid-September. The Russians captured Lemberg, the capital of Galicia, and the great fortress of Przemysl was besieged.

Austria-Hungary lost an estimated 400,000 men in the first months of the war, including a large part of its trained officer corps and non-commissioned officers. The losses were never fully made good, and the Austro-Hungarian army’s quality declined for the rest of the war.

By the end of 1914, the Eastern Front (World War I) had settled into a long line running from the Baltic coast through Poland to the Carpathians, but it remained a front of movement, not the static trench system of the west.

1915: Gorlice-Tarnow and the Great Retreat

The year 1915 was the worst year of the war for Russia. In May, a combined German-Austrian force under August von Mackensen, with strong artillery support, broke through the Russian lines at Gorlice-Tarnow in Galicia. The breakthrough, which began on 2 May 1915, shattered the Russian Third Army and opened a gap that the Central Powers exploited for months.

The Russians were forced into the Great Retreat, abandoning Galicia, including Lemberg and Przemysl, and then Russian Poland, including Warsaw, which fell in August 1915. By the autumn, the front had moved hundreds of kilometres east, to a line running from Riga in the north through Vilnius and Pinsk to the Romanian border. Russia had lost vast territory, millions of men as casualties and prisoners, and enormous quantities of equipment.

The retreat was a human catastrophe as well as a military defeat. As Russian armies fell back, the authorities ordered a scorched-earth policy and the forced evacuation of civilians from the borderlands. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of them Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian and Baltic civilians, fled eastwards in terrible conditions.

The retreat exposed the weaknesses of the Russian state: factories could not replace the guns and shells that had been lost, transport collapsed, and food shortages began to appear in the cities. Yet Russia did not collapse in 1915. Its armies, though battered, held a new line, and the vast distances of the east meant that the Central Powers could not deliver a knockout blow.

The front stabilised in the autumn, and both sides dug in for the winter, although the lines were thinner and more fluid than in the west.

In the same year, Italy entered the war against Austria-Hungary in May 1915, opening the Italian Front (World War I), and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in October, helping to overrun Serbia. These events stretched Austria-Hungary further, but they did not relieve the pressure on Russia, which remained the main eastern opponent of the Central Powers.

1916: Lake Naroch and the Brusilov Offensive

In 1916, Russia attempted to take the offensive again. In March, it attacked at Lake Naroch in present-day Belarus, hoping to relieve pressure on France at Verdun, but the attack was poorly prepared, launched across marshy ground in thawing conditions, and failed with heavy losses. The main Russian effort of the year came in the south, where General Alexei Brusilov commanded the South-Western Front against Austria-Hungary.

The Brusilov Offensive, which began on 4 June 1916, was one of the most remarkable operations of the war. Instead of a narrow breakthrough preceded by a long bombardment that warned the enemy, Brusilov attacked along a broad front of more than 400 kilometres, with short, intense bombardments, careful preparation of assault trenches close to the enemy lines, and the use of shock troops and infiltration tactics.

The offensive shattered the Austro-Hungarian armies in Galicia and Volhynia. In the first weeks, the Russians advanced up to 80 kilometres in places, captured Lutsk and Czernowitz, and took hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Austria-Hungary was brought close to collapse and had to beg Germany for help. Germany transferred divisions from the west and from other fronts, and Austria-Hungary had to strip troops from the Italian Front (World War I).

The Brusilov Offensive also had wider consequences: it encouraged Romania to enter the war on the Allied side in August 1916, and it forced the Central Powers to divert resources that might otherwise have been used at Verdun or on the Somme. But the offensive eventually ran out of momentum. Russian losses were heavy, supply lines stretched, and Brusilov’s neighbouring fronts failed to support him with attacks of their own.

By September 1916, the offensive had ended, with the front advanced but not broken through. The cost had been enormous on both sides, and the Russian army, though victorious, had spent much of its best-trained manpower.

Romania’s entry into the war proved to be a disaster for the new ally. Its armies invaded Transylvania in August 1916 but were soon driven back by a German-Austrian-Bulgarian force under Mackensen and Erich von Falkenhayn. By December 1916, Bucharest had fallen, and Romania was reduced to a small strip of territory in Moldavia, kept in the war only by Russian help. The campaign added a new southern sector to the Eastern Front (World War I), running along the Danube and the Carpathians, and it tied down Russian troops who were needed elsewhere.

1917: Revolution and the Collapse of the Russian Army

The year 1917 decided the fate of the Eastern Front (World War I), and it was decided not on the battlefield but in the streets of Petrograd. In March 1917, food shortages, war weariness and political discontent brought down the Russian monarchy. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, and a Provisional Government took power, promising to continue the war. The army, however, was already disintegrating.

Soldiers’ committees, formed after the revolution, undermined the authority of officers. Discipline collapsed, desertion rose sharply, and units began to refuse orders. The Provisional Government, under pressure from its Western Allies, ordered a last offensive in July 1917, known as the Kerensky Offensive, after the war minister Alexander Kerensky. It achieved some initial success in Galicia but then collapsed when German and Austrian counterattacks met little resistance.

Russian soldiers, who had been told that the war would continue, simply walked away from the front.

In November 1917, the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin seized power in Petrograd. One of their first acts was to call for an immediate end to the war. In December, they signed an armistice with the Central Powers, and negotiations began at Brest-Litovsk. The talks dragged on through the winter, with the Bolsheviks hoping for revolution in Germany and the Central Powers demanding large territorial concessions.

When negotiations broke down in February 1918, Germany launched Operation Faustschlag, advancing rapidly across the Baltic states, Belarus and Ukraine against almost no resistance. The German advance forced the Bolsheviks to accept harsh terms, and on 3 March 1918 the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed.

Russia left the war, ceding Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine — territory containing about a quarter of its population and much of its industry and agriculture — to German and Austrian control or to nominal independence under German influence.

Turning Point

The turning point of the Eastern Front (World War I) was not a single battle but the Russian Revolution of 1917, which removed Russia from the war and changed the whole course of the conflict. Before 1917, the front had been a contest of armies: Germany and Austria-Hungary could win battles, but they could not destroy Russia, and Russia, despite its defeats, could always raise new armies and trade space for time.

After the February Revolution, that contest ended, because the Russian army ceased to function as an army. The Kerensky Offensive of July 1917 was the last Russian offensive of the war, and its failure showed that the army would no longer fight.

From that moment, the Central Powers could transfer dozens of divisions from the east to the west, and they did so in the winter of 1917–1918, preparing the great German spring offensives of 1918 on the Western Front.

If a single military turning point must be named, it is the Brusilov Offensive of 1916. Brusilov’s success nearly destroyed Austria-Hungary as a military power and forced Germany to take over the direction of the war in the east. After Brusilov, Austria-Hungary was no longer an equal partner but a junior ally dependent on German support, and the strain of the offensive exhausted the Russian army’s reserves.

The offensive also showed that a well-prepared attack could break through even a fortified front, and its methods — short bombardments, broad-front attacks and infiltration — influenced German tactics in 1917 and 1918. Yet Brusilov did not win the war in the east. Russia lacked the reserves and the logistics to exploit its victory, and the political crisis of 1917, not a battlefield defeat, ended Russia’s part in the war.

The Eastern Front (World War I) thus illustrates a central truth of the First World War: that modern war is fought by states as well as armies, and that a state which collapses politically cannot continue to fight, however brave its soldiers may be.

Casualties and Losses

Casualty figures for the Eastern Front (World War I) are uncertain, and historians disagree about the exact totals. The figures below are ranges, not precise counts, and they reflect the best available estimates. Russian military deaths are commonly estimated at 1.7 to 2.2 million, with total Russian military casualties — dead, wounded, missing and prisoners — estimated at 9 million or more.

German military deaths on the Eastern Front are estimated at several hundred thousand, with total German casualties in the east of more than 2 million. Austro-Hungarian military deaths are estimated at more than 1 million in total across all fronts, with a large share falling on the Eastern Front (World War I), especially in 1914 and 1916. Romanian military deaths are estimated at about 300,000 to 340,000.

Overall, estimates range from about 2 million to more than 3 million military dead on this front, and total casualties, including wounded and prisoners, are estimated at 10 million or more.

The Brusilov Offensive alone was extraordinarily costly. Austro-Hungarian losses are estimated at about 1 million to 1.5 million men, including roughly 400,000 prisoners, while Russian losses are estimated at about 500,000 to 1 million. At Tannenberg, Russian losses were about 30,000 killed and wounded and more than 90,000 prisoners, against German losses of about 12,000 to 15,000.

These figures show the scale of the fighting, but they do not capture the civilian cost. The war in the east displaced millions of people, destroyed towns and villages across Poland, Galicia, Serbia and Romania, and brought famine and disease in its wake. Prisoners of war suffered terribly, especially Russian prisoners in German and Austrian camps, where hundreds of thousands died of hunger, disease and exposure.

The Eastern Front (World War I) was a war of peoples as well as armies, and its human cost extended far beyond the battlefield.

Map and Geography

A Front of Vast Distances

The geography of the Eastern Front (World War I) explains much of its character. The front ran from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea and the Romanian border in the south, crossing a landscape of forests, lakes, marshes, plains and mountains. In the north, East Prussia was a land of lakes and forests, ideal for defence but difficult for large armies to move through.

The Masurian Lakes, where the Russians were defeated in 1914, formed a natural barrier that channelled movement along narrow corridors. Further south lay the Polish plains, open country where cavalry could still operate and where armies could move quickly when the weather was dry, but where mud in spring and autumn — the rasputitsa — could halt all movement.

The great Pripet Marshes, in present-day Belarus and Ukraine, divided the front into northern and southern sectors and were almost impassable to large formations.

In the south, the Carpathian Mountains formed a natural barrier between Galicia and the Hungarian plain. Fighting in the Carpathians in the winter of 1914–1915 was among the most terrible of the war, with soldiers freezing to death in the snow and whole units lost in mountain passes. The Carpathians protected Hungary from Russian invasion, but they also trapped Austro-Hungarian armies in costly winter offensives that achieved little. Further south still, the Danube and the Romanian Carpathians shaped the Romanian campaign of 1916–1917. The Eastern Front (World War I) was therefore not one front but several, each with its own terrain, climate and problems, and generals had to fight in forests, marshes, plains and mountains, often at the same time.

Railways, Rivers and the Problem of Supply

The most important geographical fact of the Eastern Front (World War I) was the railway. Russia was vast, but its railway network was thin, and Russian railways used a broader gauge than German and Austrian railways. When German armies advanced into Russia, they had to rebuild the railways behind them before they could supply their troops, and when Russian armies advanced into Germany or Austria-Hungary, they faced the same problem in reverse.

This meant that offensives could advance only as far as their railheads, and that a breakthrough of 100 kilometres could be followed by weeks of pause while the railways were converted. Rivers also mattered. The Vistula, the Bug, the Dniester and the Danube were major obstacles that had to be crossed under fire, and their bridges were key objectives.

The poor road network, the lack of motor transport and the sheer size of the theatre meant that the Eastern Front (World War I) remained a war of movement longer than the Western Front, but it was movement in slow motion, dictated by railways, rivers and weather as much as by generals.

Outcome and Legacy of Eastern Front (World War I)

The immediate outcome of the Eastern Front (World War I) was a Central Powers victory in the east. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 3 March 1918 gave Germany control of vast territories in the east and freed dozens of German divisions for the Western Front.

For a few months in the spring of 1918, it seemed that Germany had won the war in the east and might win it in the west as well. But the victory was hollow. The territories Germany gained were in chaos, with nationalist movements, Bolshevik agitation and peasant revolts, and Germany had to keep hundreds of thousands of troops in the east to occupy them.

The resources Germany hoped to extract from Ukraine — grain, coal and iron — never arrived in the quantities expected, because transport had collapsed and the countryside was in revolt. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was annulled by the Armistice of 11 November 1918, and the German armies in the east withdrew.

The longer legacy of the Eastern Front (World War I) was the redrawing of the map of Eastern Europe. The Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires all collapsed in 1917–1918, and from their ruins emerged new states: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Ukraine attempted independence but was absorbed into the Soviet Union after a civil war.

The war in the east also left a legacy of violence that continued long after 1918. The Russian Civil War, the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921, and the conflicts in the Baltic states and Ukraine were direct continuations of the Eastern Front (World War I), fought over the same ground by many of the same men. The front also left a deep memory in the countries that fought there.

In Russia, the war is remembered as a catastrophe that brought revolution and civil war. In Germany, Tannenberg became a national myth, and Hindenburg became a hero. In Poland, the war is remembered as the moment when independence, lost for more than a century, was regained.

The Eastern Front (World War I) is often overshadowed in English-language histories by the Western Front, but in Eastern Europe it was the war that changed everything, and its consequences — new states, new borders and new conflicts — shaped the twentieth century.

Commanders

Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff

Paul von Hindenburg, recalled from retirement in August 1914 to command the German Eighth Army, became the most famous German commander of the war. With his chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff, he won the victories of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes and then commanded the German forces in the east for most of the war.

In 1916, Hindenburg and Ludendorff took over the German high command as a whole, and they directed Germany’s war effort until the end of the conflict. Hindenburg was a symbol of steadiness and tradition, Ludendorff the driving force behind German strategy. Together, they embodied the German military system at its best — and, in their later support for unrestricted submarine warfare and their refusal to accept defeat, at its worst.

Alexei Brusilov

Alexei Brusilov was the most successful Russian general of the First World War. A cavalry officer who had served in the Russo-Japanese War, he commanded the Eighth Army in 1914–1915 and the South-Western Front in 1916. His offensive of June 1916 was a masterpiece of preparation and surprise, and it remains a classic study in military academies. Brusilov was unusual among Russian generals in that he paid close attention to the welfare of his men, to careful planning and to the use of new tactics. After the revolution, he served the Soviet government as a military adviser, and he died in Moscow in 1926. His memoirs are one of the most important sources for the Eastern Front (World War I).

Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf and Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich

Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff from 1906 to 1917, was the architect of Austria-Hungary’s war policy. He was energetic and ambitious, but his plans were too grand for the resources available, and his offensives in Galicia, Serbia and the Carpathians cost his army hundreds of thousands of men.

Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, the Russian commander-in-chief in 1914–1915, was a tall, imposing figure who was popular with the troops but who lacked the staff and the resources to match the German army. He was replaced by the Tsar in September 1915 and sent to command in the Caucasus.

Both men illustrate the difficulties of commanding multi-national armies in a war of this scale, and both were ultimately overwhelmed by the forces they had helped to unleash.

Related articles

• Italian Front (World War I)
• Macedonian Front
• Battle of Tannenberg

Frequently Asked Questions

Was the Eastern Front (World War I) the same as the Eastern Front in the Second World War?

No. The Eastern Front (World War I) was fought in 1914–1918 between Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side and Russia and Romania on the other. The Eastern Front of the Second World War was fought in 1941–1945 between Germany and the Soviet Union, on much of the same ground but with different states, armies and weapons. The two fronts should not be confused.

Why was the Eastern Front (World War I) more mobile than the Western Front?

The front was far longer, the armies were thinner on the ground, and the terrain was more open. There were not enough men to build a continuous trench line from the Baltic to the Black Sea, so armies could outflank each other, and advances of 100 kilometres or more were common. Railways and weather, not trenches, limited movement.

What was the Battle of Tannenberg?

Tannenberg, fought from 26 to 30 August 1914, was a German victory in East Prussia in which the Russian Second Army was encircled and destroyed. Russian losses were about 30,000 killed and wounded and more than 90,000 prisoners. It made Hindenburg and Ludendorff famous and forced Russia onto the defensive in the north.

What was the Brusilov Offensive?

The Brusilov Offensive was a Russian offensive of June to September 1916 against Austria-Hungary in Galicia and Volhynia. It used broad-front attacks and short bombardments to achieve surprise, advanced up to 80 kilometres, and inflicted losses estimated at 1 million to 1.5 million on Austria-Hungary. It nearly destroyed the Austro-Hungarian army.

How did the Eastern Front (World War I) end?

It ended with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, by which Bolshevik Russia left the war and ceded vast territories to the Central Powers. The treaty was annulled by the Armistice of November 1918, after Germany’s defeat in the west, and the territories concerned became the subject of new wars and new states.

Why did Russia leave the war in 1917–1918?

The strain of the war helped to bring down the monarchy in March 1917, and the army then disintegrated as discipline collapsed and soldiers deserted. The Bolsheviks, who seized power in November 1917, promised peace and signed an armistice in December 1917, followed by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918.

Sources

• Eastern Front (World War I) — Wikipedia