The Brusilov Offensive, 1916: Russia's greatest victory of the Great War

By the spring of 1916 the Eastern Front had settled down after Russia's great retreat of 1915. At Chantilly in February the Allies had agreed to attack together that summer, and the Russian high command, Stavka, promised offensives to take pressure off France and Italy. Then the Germans struck at Verdun on 21 February, and a hurried Russian attack north of the Pripet Marshes in March, the Naroch offensive, stalled in the spring thaw.²

The general who wanted to attack

Stavka's plan for the summer gave the main blow to the Western Front, north of the Pripet. General Aleksei Brusilov had taken over the Southwestern Front, facing Austria-Hungary, in April. At a conference on 14 April, John Rickard writes, he was the only one of the three front commanders willing to attack, even though his was the only front where the Russians did not outnumber the enemy. When the Austrians attacked Italy in the Trentino in May and the Italians asked for help, his offensive was moved up to 4 June.³

A new way to break a front

Brusilov had thought hard about trench warfare. Instead of massing guns and reserves in front of one sector, which let the defender rush his own reserves to the threatened spot, he attacked at many points along the whole front at once. His men dug saps forward until no man's land, often a mile wide in the east, was only about 75 yards across. Dugouts sheltered the assault troops, reserves stood close behind, the attacks were rehearsed, and the bombardment was short, to keep surprise.⁴

The sources disagree on the numbers. According to Bruce Menning in the Encyclopedia of Modern Europe, Brusilov committed more than half a million men and 1,700 guns against Austro-Hungarian forces about half as strong. Rickard gives a much smaller figure for the opening attack: 200,000 men with 900 guns against 150,000 men with 600 guns, a ratio far below what offensives in the west thought necessary.⁵

The breakthrough

The attack began on 4 June and caught the Austro-Hungarians by surprise. In the north General Kaledin's 8th Army broke the front around Lutsk; in the south the 9th Army pushed the Austro-Hungarian 7th Army back until it was split in two and the Russians were moving toward the Carpathians. In the first phase, to 15 June, four Russian armies broke through at different depths, until Kaledin met fierce German counterattacks west of Lutsk on 14 June.⁶

Then the momentum faded. General Evert's Western Front, which was supposed to deliver the main blow, gave only weak support, and Stavka moved reserves south too late. The Germans sent reinforcements, more than 24 divisions in Menning's count and 15 in Rickard's, and the fighting turned into slogging matches along the Stokhod River. Menning ends the offensive on 13 August; Rickard counts two later attacks and a final push that lasted until 20 September.⁷

Polish Legions at Kostiuchnówka

Polish soldiers fought on the Austro-Hungarian side. The road to Kovel, one of the Russian lines of advance, ran past Kostiuchnówka on the Styr, held by the Polish Legions. From 4 to 6 July some 5,500 legionaries and 800 lancers, according to dzieje.pl, held off about 13,000 Russian infantry and 3,000 cavalry until Hungarian units on their flanks gave way. About 2,000 Poles were killed or wounded, which makes it the bloodiest battle of the Legions. More on it in our guide to the battles that won Polish independence.⁸

A victory Russia could not afford

The cost was enormous on both sides. Menning puts Russian casualties at about half a million. Rickard gives far higher figures: one million Russian, at least as many Austro-Hungarian and 350,000 German. Erik Sass, writing for Mental Floss, goes higher still: 1.4 million Russian casualties from June to September. The advance reached depths of 60 to 150 kilometers on a front of some 550 kilometers in Menning's account, and between 20 and 100 miles in Rickard's.⁹

The results were large but not decisive. The Austro-Hungarian army never recovered its fighting power and fell more and more under German command. The offensive helped relieve the pressure on Verdun and Italy, and with the Allied attack on the Somme forced Germany onto the defensive. Romania, encouraged, declared war on the Central Powers on 27 August, and Falkenhayn lost his post as German chief of staff at the end of August. But Russia's own losses eroded its army's morale and manpower, and both historians link them to the revolution of 1917. Brusilov himself, Rickard notes, became commander in chief in May 1917 and later served the Bolsheviks; he died in Moscow in 1926.¹⁰