Catastrophic Victory: The Brusilov Offensive And The Collapse Of Imperial Russia

The Great War in Galicia (Western Ukraine), 1916: REPOSTED

Morale was very high under Brusilov’s command

Originally published in 2023.

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It was “by most estimates the greatest military achievement of the war” for Russia, Timothy C. Dowling writes in The Brusilov Offensive, his 2008 history of the Imperial Russian Army’s final glory. For unlike most Russian commanders, Aleksei Brusilov had absorbed the lessons of 1914 and 1915. He understood how to fight this new kind of war.

“His work in coordinating infantry and artillery, including the use of aircraft, may well merit the claim of Soviet military historians that Brusilov was among the founders of modern combined-arms doctrine,” Dowling says. He is hardly alone in his esteem. Brusilov has been received by military historiography as a maestro of war machinery.

This image is in part a creation of Brusilov himself. “An artillery commander must direct his fire in much the same manner as a conductor directs an orchestra and his role is of the greatest importance” on the offensive, Brusilov wrote poetically. “I considered it absolutely vital to develop an attack at many different points,” he told a Times of London interviewer of his famous offensive, leaning in.

Remaining above politics just long enough for the Bolsheviks to welcome him, Aleksei Alekseyevich Brusilov was a shrewd man who, as victor, got to write his own history. Reading into the offensive that bears his name, that supposed success seems directly related to the collapse of Romanov Russia immediately afterward, suggesting a reexamination may be in order.

Brusilov’s victory proved limited, and costly. Altogether, the armies under his command suffered more than half a million casualties from June to November 1916. They had incurred almost three times as many total killed, wounded, and captured on the Central Powers, but it was not enough to break Austria. Instead, it fused Germany and Austria together as a single force in the east, formations being mixed and Germans taking command.

Five weeks into Brusilov’s offensive, “the army commanders of the Central Powers believed that the Brusilov offensive had to be regarded as a failure,” Dowling writes. Despite claiming hundreds of thousands of Austro-Hungarian prisoners, Brusilov’s armies “failed to make any significant breakthroughs” and the Central Powers continually checked their advances, if at tremendous loss themselves each time.

Despite superb concealment efforts, sapping approaches could not be hidden, giving the enemy advanced warning before zero hour. German and Austrian signals intelligence provided crucial knowledge of Russian intentions throughout the battle. Retreats were orderly, while the large numbers of Austrian troops surrendering to Russians tended to slow their advance down. Many Russian units did not follow up their initial successes, while others suffered extremely high casualty rates in botched support operations carried out by commanders who lacked Brusilov’s understanding of modern arms.

Maj. Gen. Alfred Knox, a British military observer, witnessed the Imperial Guards regiments take 80 percent casualties trying to execute the botched mission plan of Gen. Aleksander Bezobrazov, one of many incompetents who enjoyed royal court favor at the expense of Russian soldiers. W. Bruce Lincoln describes the scene in his 1986 history, Passage Through Armageddon: Russians in War and Revolution.

Combining unsound tactics with criminally poor strategy, Bezobrazov and his two chief subordinates slaughtered the flower of Russia’s army in a few days. Behind them stood one of the heaviest concentrations of heavy artillery yet seen on the eastern front, but their gunners had to plot targets on maps that had not been corrected since 1897 because Russia’s General Staff had never thought that the army might have to fight so deep inside Russian territory. When Brusilov ordered the Guards into action in the middle of July, Pavel Aleksandrovich unhesitatingly disobeyed his orders and sent his men to attack through a swamp over which German planes hovered to take them with machine-gun fire while they struggled through chest-deep water and mud. While General Knox watched in horror, German airmen returned again and again to strafe the thousands of trapped Guards. “The wounded sank slowly in the marsh, and it was impossible to send them help,” Knox confided to his diary a few hours after the grand duke’s murderous performance. “The Russian Command for some unknown reason,” he concluded, “seems always to choose a bog to drown in.” Absurdly unaware of the slaughter into which his personally chosen commanders had led his prize troops, Nicholas wrote to Aleksandra that Pavel Aleksandrovich’s Guards were “attacking and performing miracles.”

Altogether, Bezobrazov initiated 17 separate attacks from 1 August to 16 September, all meeting this fate. German Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg was florid in his prose about this fighting; the true number of dead Russians could never be known. “All we know is that sometimes in our battles with the Russians we had to remove the mounds of enemy corpses from before our trenches in order to get a clear field of fire against fresh assaulting waves.”

Perhaps the reader is reminded of more recent events in Russian military history: the astounding debacles that took place around Vuhledar in February, or the endless “human wave” attacks by Wagner forces at Bakhmut, for example.

Kremlin interference, and detachment from the consequences, are also not new developments. Brusilov was the beneficiary of successful arms production increases made possible by Gen. Alexei Polivanov, Minister of War. Russia had begun the conflict without enough rifles, bullets, shells, or boots; now Russia’s problem was delivering the plenteous supplies on hand to the front. But Tsarina Aleksandra and her infamous courtier Rasputin despised Polivanov and his policy changes. Henpecked, her husband Nicholas II remarked that “after P’s removal I shall sleep in peace.” Thus the man who had made Brusilov’s offensive possible lost his job for it.

Summoned to an audience of his own with the empress, whose retinue was notorious for leaks, Brusilov politely refused to supply any details about his upcoming offensive. “After a cold welcome, she gave me an even colder farewell,” he noted.

When the February Revolution brought matters to a head in 1917, he argued for the Tsar’s abdication, otherwise Russia would be incapable of offensive action. Brusilov had been the only field commander to undertake an offensive during 1916. In 1917, he was still the only man arguing for an offensive, and he needed the Tsar out of the way to get it.

Brusilov and his bulge

Russian offensives since January this year have destroyed more Russian manpower and equipment than Ukrainian. Both sides are suffering shortages of rockets and shells, but the Russian problem is clearly worse. Running through eastern and southern Ukraine, at the time of this writing the battlefront is effectively doubled in length by its serpentine shape. Every Russian mobik (mobilized reservist) lost in fruitless assaults at Avdiivka today will be unavailable to defend this overlong front, while every survivor will be required to defend a greater portion of it when Ukraine counterattacks.

Likewise, Brusilov had trained and equipped an army with the requisite machine guns, artillery, and other weapons needed for breakthrough and then spent this force in five months. Brusilov ended his offensive when he had reached the limit of his logistics and manpower, having created a great bulge in the Eastern Front. Russians now had to defend this extended frontage with a reduced density of troops and guns. Brusilov had assembled mountains of artillery ammunition and expended ten shells to every one the Central Powers had used.

When Brusilov took over command of XIV Army Corps in 1909, he had found “only one pair of boots per man, and those in disrepair,” Lincoln recounts. Shortages of boots had still plagued Russian mobilization in 1914. By 1916, there were plenty of boots, but the men wearing them were not the same men as before. Russia had a different army, and by the end of the year, that one was gone, too, replaced with another that was even more different.

“It is time to drive out the dishonorable enemy,” Brusilov declared in his order to begin the offensive on 4 June. “All armies on our front are attacking at the same time. I am convinced that our iron armies will win the victory.”

His habit was to open fire on the enemy lines at 4 AM, bombard them for three hours, and then assess the damage in the morning light and have his artillerists adjust their fire. At first, this tactic often caught the Austrians outside their dugouts, in their shattered trenches, waiting for the Russian infantry, thus inflicting heavy casualties. Austrians soon distrusted any lull in the bombardment. Careful preparations allowed many Russian advance units to reach the Austrian bunkers moments after the bombardment lifted and force the occupants to surrender with grenades. Eleventh Army used a formation of 13 armored cars to spearhead an attack along a rail line, a preview of armored maneuvers to come.

But the exhaustion of Brusilov’s motivated, ready force meant that follow-up attacks were not as well-planned or successful. “The Russians found … that without the precise artillery preparation and the element of suprise their attacks declined in effectiveness,” Dowling writes.

Distance was a problem for both sides, but worse for Russia. Every soldier had to be transported three times as far, on average, just to reach the battlefield. Russia did not finish a modern rail line from the White Sea to the front until the last year of the war, and the port at Archangelsk was small. Supplies and raw materials could arrive from factories in allied countries via the Pacific through Vladivostok, but then they had to travel the entire length of Russia. As a result, aircraft, ammunition, and all manner of war material often languished in the inefficient and overloaded Russian railroad system and never reached the front.

As 1916 began, Lincoln says, “new seeds of discord were about to sprout. That spring, these set their roots firmly and began to flourish in the soil of Russian discontent.” Aleksandr Konovalev, a Russian Provisional government minister in 1917, remarked that “it was in October [1916] that living conditions became really alarming, and it was from this time that the revolutionary mood must be dated.”

The mood and character of the Russian army also changed now as the people in it changed. An aristocratic officer class had been all but annihilated by the defeats and disasters of 1914-1915, while the army had grown much larger. As a result, more than 70 percent of officers in the Imperial Russian Army were peasant soldiers by the end of 1916, and they brought radical politics with them. Russia saw its first mutinies in the deep, dark days of December.

Still a lone voice among all the generals of the Stavka (General Staff) arguing for offensive action in 1917, Brusilov was concerned by the decline of discipline in the ranks. Officers could no longer expect Russians to follow commands without quesiton. “The average Russian soldier was indeed very much like an Indian buffalo,” Gen. Knox observed. “He would go anywhere he was led or driven, but would not wander into uncomfortable places on his own.” Now he could not be led into those places at all. Brusilov worried that the situation had “significantly turned for the worse” in April. Yet he still pressed for a renewed offensive throughout May.

When it happened in June, the so-called Kerensky Offensive — which had originally been envisioned as a “Second Brusilov” operation — was a debacle that led to capitulation and a separate peace. It was the definitive beginning of the end for the old imperial Russia. French observers thought Russian generals had lost the “faith" that was “so indispensable to the success of any military undertaking.” In fact the mobilization system was unable to produce enough conscripts, for half of the fighting-age male peasants were either dead, already in uniform, or working in factories that met the needs of war.

Strategic dilemmas distracted. With perfect timing, the Romanian government entered the war just as Brusilov’s offensive ended, and then the Romanian army collapsed immediately as Bulgaria invaded them from the south. Rather than gain an ally, Russia was draining equipment and armies into yet another collapsing front, out of reserves, with unrest in the ranks. “The Romanian debacle marked, in many ways, the beginning of the end for Russia,” Dowling writes.

During the Brusilov offensive, one-third of all Hapsburg casualties had been prisoners of war, and six out of ten of these were deserters. Now desertion became a problem for Russia in turn, as that vast landscape beckoned peasants to vanish into it and return home, or to the cities, where half of the labor force had been involved in at least one strike during 1913, on the eve of war.

“Russia had telescoped the industrial revolution into a single generation and drawn down upon herself all the blessings and curses that the process had long since bestowed upon her western neighbors,” Lincoln writes. With so many men missing from farms, women were doing most of the planting. Policy made the food crisis which made the Revolution, however. Bumper crops during the previous two years did not result in lower food prices during 1916 because the market was mishandled. Wartime inflation played a part as well, for it had driven the prices of consumer goods out of reach for many Russians, with those goods unavailable at all for many. Riots broke out.

As the Brusilov Offensive staggered to a halt in October 1916, the metallisty — tens of thousands of metal workers, newly arrived and radicalized in Petrograd during the war, on whom the entire war machinery depended — led a strike to demand the release of political prisoners. Production halted for two weeks. The offensive sputtered out. One Moscow journalist wrote of the mood change. “It was as if no one, anywhere, expected any happiness. Everyone, languishing, was waiting for the drama’s denouement.”

When the Great Retreat of 1915 had stabilized along a straightened front, Gen. Brusilov thought it heralded a new Russian spirit. “Until this moment, the army alone has made war as best it can with the limited means at its disposal. Now the entire nation will do it.” When he launched his great offensive of 1916, that was even true. When his offensive ended, however, it was not true anymore.