The Brusilov Offensive, 1916: Russia's greatest victory of World War I

In June 1916, while the armies in France were locked in the slaughter at Verdun, a Russian general did what almost nobody on any front had managed: he broke an entrenched enemy line wide open. Within days the Austro-Hungarian armies facing him were in flight. Britannica calls it imperial Russia's last really effective military effort, one whose early success revived Allied dreams of the Russian steamroller, and the price of that effort helped wear down the army that had won it.²

Background: the Eastern Front in 1916

By the spring of 1916 the Eastern Front had settled down after Russia's great retreat of 1915. The Russian armies, grouped into three fronts, Northern, Western and Southwestern, had recovered quickly; the Pripet Marshes split the line in two. At Chantilly 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 at great cost.³

Stavka's plan for the summer gave the main blow to General Alexei Evert's Western Front, north of the Pripet, with the Northern and Southwestern Fronts in support. Then on 15 May the Austro-Hungarians attacked the Italians in the Trentino, and Italy asked Russia for help. The Southwestern Front's attack was moved up to 4 June, on the understanding that Evert would strike soon after.⁴

Armies and commanders

Aleksei Brusilov was born in Tiflis in 1853, trained in the Corps of Pages and made his career in the cavalry. He fought in the Caucasus in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878, rose to general, and in 1914 led the 8th Army in the Russian victories in Galicia. In the spring of 1916 he took over the Southwestern Front, four armies facing Austria-Hungary between the Pripet Marshes and the Romanian border.⁵ › Battle of Kraśnik, 1914

He was the odd man out among the Russian commanders. At a conference in April, John Rickard writes, he was the only one of the three front commanders willing to attack. Britannica describes a general with common sense and a willingness to learn from past failures, who insisted that with surprise and preparation an offensive could succeed where others thought it futile.⁶

Against him stood the Austro-Hungarian armies of eastern Galicia and Bukovina, stiffened by German troops. How many men each side had is disputed. Menning writes that 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. Britannica, for its part, says the Austrians far outnumbered the attacking Russians.⁷

A new way to break a front

Brusilov had thought hard about trench warfare. The usual method massed guns and reserves in front of one sector, which told the defender where to send his own reserves. Instead he chose many breakthrough sectors along the whole front, so the enemy could not know where the main blow would fall. 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, and the attacks were rehearsed, in Britannica's account on full-size replicas of the positions to be stormed. The bombardment was short by the standards of the day, a matter of hours, to keep surprise.⁸

The battle in phases

The breakthrough

The attack began on 4 June and caught the Austro-Hungarians wholly by surprise. In the north General Alexei Kaledin's 8th Army broke the front around Lutsk and drove between two Austrian armies; in the south the Russians drove into Bukovina and on toward the Carpathians. Austro-Hungarian soldiers surrendered in masses. 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.⁹

Momentum lost

Then the momentum faded. Evert's Western Front, which was supposed to deliver the main blow, found reasons to wait and gave only weak support. Stavka shifted reserves south only slowly, and the Germans, under Alexander von Linsingen, reinforced the Austrians first. Brusilov kept pushing in the center and the south, and his forces in Bukovina reached the Carpathians, but the decisive point at Lutsk was checked.¹⁰

Toward Kovel: the Polish Legions at Kostiuchnówka

In July the Russians turned toward Kovel, a rail junction that would have unhinged the German position north of the marshes. Polish soldiers stood in the way, on the Austro-Hungarian side. From 4 to 6 July the Polish Legions held the line of the Styr at Kostiuchnówka against attacking Russian divisions. When Hungarian troops on their flank gave way on the first day, the legionaries fought on, counterattacked to retake the high ground known as Polish Hill, and withdrew only on 6 July when their flanks had collapsed. The 5th Infantry Regiment of the First Brigade suffered worst, losing more than half its men. In all about 2,000 Poles were killed, wounded or missing, which makes Kostiuchnówka the bloodiest battle of the Legions. More on it in our guide to the battles that won Polish independence.¹¹

Stalemate on the Stokhod

In the third phase, from 9 July, Stavka belatedly shifted forces south, but too little came too late. The offensive died out in a series of slugging matches along the Stokhod River, a marshy line where the Austro-German front hardened. The sources do not agree on when it ended: Britannica dates the end to 10 August, Menning to 13 August, while Rickard counts two further attacks and a final push that lasted until 20 September.¹²

Turning point

The offensive was won in its first week and lost in its second. Brusilov's attack had been meant as a supporting blow; when it became the main one, nobody else moved. In Britannica's account Evert and the northern commander Kuropatkin found excuses for delay, and Menning places much of the blame on Stavka's failure to control operations across several fronts and to send reserves where success had been won. The Germans had time to bring divisions east: more than 24 in Menning's count, 15 in Rickard's, and at least seven taken from the Western Front, according to Britannica.¹³

Aftermath

The cost was enormous on both sides, and the figures vary widely. Menning puts Russian casualties at about half a million. Britannica gives a range of 500,000 to one million Russians dead, wounded or captured, many of them deserters or prisoners, against some 1.5 million for the Central Powers, including 350,000 Germans. Rickard gives one million Russian, at least as many Austro-Hungarian and 350,000 German casualties. 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.¹⁴

The results were large but not decisive. The Austro-Hungarian army never recovered its fighting power and fell more and more under German command, and Austria had to break off its attack on Italy. With the Allied attack on the Somme, the offensive forced Germany onto the defensive. Romania, encouraged, declared war on 27 August, and on 29 August Falkenhayn lost his post as German chief of staff to Hindenburg.¹⁵

Romania's entry turned out to be a poisoned gift. The Central Powers struck back quickly, and the dismissed Falkenhayn, sent to command in Transylvania, played a leading part in the defeat of the new ally. Menning notes that Romania soon needed Russian reinforcements, which drained still more of Russia's strength.¹⁶

Legacy and memory

For Russia the victory was a slow wound. Menning writes that the losses, and the erosion of morale, manpower and equipment, probably hastened the disintegration of the Russian army in 1917; Britannica goes further and calls the offensive's ultimate achievement the death knell of the Russian monarchy, and Rickard notes that the losses have been blamed for that year's revolution.¹⁷

Brusilov himself outlived the empire. In May 1917 (Old Style) the Provisional Government made him commander in chief, but after the failure of the summer offensive in Galicia he was replaced in July and retired to Moscow. Unusually for a tsarist general, he later served the Bolsheviks, joining the Red Army during the war with Poland in 1920 and working as an inspector of cavalry. He died in Moscow in 1926.¹⁸

His reputation is still argued over. Evgenii Volkov notes that some historians see him as an outstanding commander whose methods were still in use in World War II, while critics say several commanders prepared the breakthrough at Lutsk and that his name became attached to it only through Soviet historiography. In Poland the offensive is remembered above all through Kostiuchnówka, the battle in which Józef Piłsudski's legionaries paid their heaviest price of the war; the photograph at the top of this page shows him in their trenches in Volhynia a few weeks later.¹⁹ › Józef Piłsudski