What Was the Brusilov Offensive?
The Brusilov Offensive was the most successful Russian operation of the First World War, and one of the most successful Allied offensives of the entire war. Launched on 4 June 1916 (22 May old style) on a 500-kilometre front in Galicia and Bukovina, it broke the Austro-Hungarian Fourth and Seventh Armies, took more than 400,000 prisoners, advanced the Russian line up to 120 kilometres in places, and forced Germany to transfer eleven divisions from the Western Front at the height of the Battle of Verdun.
It was the last of the great Russian victories, and the one that showed most clearly what the reformed Russian army of 1914-1916 could do when properly led. The cost was correspondingly high — Russian losses of more than a million men, killed, wounded, and missing — and the offensive consumed the last of the army’s offensive reserves. Within eight months, the Romanov dynasty was gone.
The strategic context
By the spring of 1916, the Eastern Front had been relatively quiet since the Russian “Great Retreat” of 1915. The French commander-in-chief, Joffre, was pressing the Russians to mount a major offensive to relieve the pressure on Verdun. At a meeting at Chantilly in March 1916, the Russian Stavka agreed to coordinate offensives with the other Allies.
The Russian front commanders, however, were divided on the strategy. General Aleksei Evert, commander of the Western Front, favoured a careful, attritional attack. General Aleksei Brusilov, commander of the Southwestern Front, had something different in mind.
Brusilov’s innovation
Brusilov’s innovation was tactical. Previous Russian offensives had begun with a heavy preliminary bombardment that warned the defender of the exact point of attack; Brusilov, by contrast, kept the artillery preparation short, used multiple small feints and diversionary attacks along the entire front to confuse the defender, and concentrated his main effort on carefully chosen sections of the line. He also insisted on detailed training of the assault troops, with full-scale rehearsals in rear areas, and on close coordination between infantry and artillery at the platoon level.
The plan was not without risk. The German and Austro-Hungarian high commands expected the Russian attack to come on the Western Front, in the direction of Vilna; Brusilov’s plan was to attack south of the Pripyat marshes, where the Austro-Hungarian forces were weakest.
The opening attacks
The offensive opened on the morning of 4 June 1916. The Russian Eighth Army, under General Aleksei Kaledin, attacked the southern sector of the Austro-Hungarian line near Lutsk; the Eleventh Army, under General Vladimir Sakharov, attacked further south. The Russian bombardment was short and accurate, and the assault troops broke into the Austro-Hungarian trenches within hours.
By the end of the first day, the Russians had taken the first Austro-Hungarian trench line in most sectors, and they had broken through in several places. The Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army, under Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, lost the bulk of its combat power in the first 48 hours. The Russian cavalry exploited the gap, advancing tens of kilometres into the Austro-Hungarian rear.
The collapse was not universal. On the southern sector, in Bukovina, the Russian Seventh Army under General Dmitry Shcherbachev made slower progress against German troops transferred from the Western Front. But the Austro-Hungarian line in Galicia had been broken, and the German high command had to act.
The German response
By mid-June, the German command had transferred eight experienced divisions under General Alexander von Linsingen to stabilise the front. The German troops were able to halt the Russian advance by mid-July, but the cost in diverted forces was significant. Falkenhayn’s calculation at Verdun had to be revised: the German reserve was being used to prop up the Austro-Hungarian front, not to maintain the pressure on the French.
The offensive also affected Italy. Brusilov’s success led the Italians to mount the Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo in August 1916, and the entry of Romania into the war on 27 August 1916 was made possible by the Russian advance. The Austro-Hungarian and German forces were forced to fight on three new fronts.
Why the offensive stopped
Brusilov had asked Stavka for support from the Western Front under Evert, but Evert’s attack, launched on 14 June 1916, was poorly coordinated and made little progress. Brusilov was forced to extend his own offensive to cover the slack. By September 1916, the Russian losses were approaching 1.4 million men, and the army was at the end of its reserves.
The breakdown of discipline that began in the autumn of 1916, and that would lead to the February Revolution of 1917, was accelerated by the exhaustion of the army in the Brusilov campaign.
What the offensive meant
For the Allies, the Brusilov Offensive was the high point of the Russian war effort. The Austro-Hungarian army, which had been an important source of military pressure on Serbia and Italy, never recovered from the losses of the summer of 1916, and the entry of Romania was a direct consequence of the offensive. For the Central Powers, the offensive showed that the Russian army was still capable of major operations when properly led, and it contributed to the German decision to unleash unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917.
For the Russian army, the Brusilov Offensive was the last great effort. Brusilov himself was not promoted to commander-in-chief after the February Revolution; he served briefly as commander-in-chief under Kerensky’s Provisional Government, and he supported the Bolsheviks after October 1917. He died in 1926, having lived to see the end of the empire he had served.