While the Western Front is regarded as the pivotal front of the First World War, its status has often overshadowed events further east. For three and a half years, Russian armies engaged the forces of the Central Powers across a broad front, contributing to the exhaustion of their forces. For this the Russians paid a terrible price, as the succession of defeats they suffered debilitated the once-mighty Imperial Russian Army and set the stage for the Russian revolutions and the devastating civil war that followed.

Though the combat record of Russia’s armies during the war is a lamentable one, one operation stands out apart from this. In the summer of 1916 Russian forces under the command of Alexei Brusilov launched a massive offensive in Galicia. For over three months, a series of assaults drove back the Austro-German forces, seizing territory on a scale not seen in Europe since the first months of the war. Though Austro-Hungarian armies came close to collapse and Romania soon joined the war in response, German reinforcements eventually stabilized the front, leaving the Russians exhausted and ripe for revolution.

Despite its scale and overall significance to the history of the war, the Brusilov Offensive has not received its due from English language historians. Because of this, as Timothy Dowling makes clear in his account of the battle, a number of misconceptions have accrued around it. Foremost among them is the belief that the offensive played a vital role in curtailing German and Austro-Hungarian operations in France and Italy. As Dowling demonstrates, though, both offensives were already over by the time the Russians began their assault. Simply put, the Brusilov Offensive was not needed to achieve its stated goals.

This is not to say, however, that the offensive was insignificant. On the contrary, Dowling makes an excellent case for its enormous legacy for the overall conflict. As he explains, it was a battle with considerable political stakes; had it succeeded in its aims, it would have fractured the Austro-German alliance and compelled Austria-Hungary to withdraw from the war. That the Germans prevented this by infusing the Austro-Hungarian armies with German forces reflects their success in this regard, as the offensive utterly destroyed the military capacity of the Austro-Hungarian empire and completed their subordination to the Germans. Though the Germans saved their ally, doing so strained their finite resources further still, though much of the benefit of this for the Russians was offset by the rapid collapse of Romania and the need to extend their own exhausted forces to protect a now-widened front.

Dowling describes all of this in an account heavy with operational details. Brusilov emerges as the hero of his tale, as Dowling credits the achievements of his offensive to his leadership, his preparations, and his willingness to innovate. That his offensive hastened the collapse of the Russian war effort and the end of the Romanov dynasty is viewed more as a testament to the general failings of an army characterized by inept commanders and an inability to overcome the logistical constraints that hobbled most offensives during the war. Had Brusilov been more capably supported he might have achieved more, but that he was the great exception among Russian commanders in terms of ability was in the end yet another symptom of a regime on borrowed time. ( )

While this has been the standard English-language account of the high point of the Tsarist military in the Great War, with this monograph being more than a decade old I do wonder if it's showing its age. There are the little things that put me off, such as casting aspersions on the sufferings of the Austrian garrison in the fall of Przemysl (when the best recent account indicates that these men endured deep misery), referring to the use of German heavy artillery against "Belgian and Dutch (!)" fortifications and the use of "Guard" as an adjective to describe various Austrian units with no clear sense of what Dowling means by this. As for the meaning of this campaign there is very little to disagree with regarding the author's conclusions though; it meant the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as an independent player while at the same time effectively taking the temper out of the imperial Russian army, thus facilitating the fall of Romanov Dynasty.

As for General Brusilov himself, this history acts as something of a biography and he appears to have been a one man "center of excellence" in an army that had far too many hacks and empty dress uniforms; he was still apparently as blind as any one else in the Russian officer corps to the coming social & political collapse of the Tsarist regime. ( )