North-Western and Western Fronts respectively, were pessimistic about the prospects for an offensive. But Brusilov promised to make things easier for them by launching an attack against the Austrians on his own South-Western Front, despite being warned that no extra men or supplies would be spared from the north. The other commanders were shocked and annoyed by his boldness. 'You have only just been appointed Front commander,' one of them told him as they sat down to dinner, 'and you are lucky enough not to be one of those picked out to take the offensive, and so aren't called upon like them to risk your military reputation. Fancy rushing into such colossal dangers!' But this complacent attitude, so typical of the Tsar's favourite generals, was a long way from Brusilov's own determination and, perhaps naive, optimism. He was sure that God was leading Russia to victory, a faith reflected throughout the war in his letters to
his wife. 'I remain convinced', he wrote to her at the height of the Great Retreat, 'that somehow things will work out and we will win the war.'45
Nor did the scorn of Brusilov's colleagues take into account the sheer ingenuity of his tactics, which were set to make his offensive, in the words of Norman Stone, the main historian of the Eastern Front, 'the most brilliant victory of the war'.46 What distinguished Brusilov's military genius was his willingness to learn from the tactical lessons of 1914—15. Ever since the Fronts had become fixed and the war of mobility had given way to the war of position, Europe's generals had attempted to break through the enemy lines by concentrating men and munitions at a single point of the Front. The German breakthrough at Gorlice was a classic example of this 'phalanx' method, which Russia's generals slavishly followed thereafter. Brusilov was the one exception. He argued that the Russians, with their primitive railways, could not hope to concentrate their forces in one place without the enemy learning of it with plenty of time to bring up defensive reserves. As long as the element of surprise continued to be sacrificed on the altar of strength, Russia could not hope to gain a decisive breakthrough. He proposed instead to attack simultaneously at several points along the Front, thus making it difficult for the enemy, even with intelligence of the offensive positions, to guess where defensive reserves would be needed most.
Intensive preparations were made for the offensive. Nothing quite like it had ever been seen before. The key to Brusilov's plan was surprise, so everything was done to safeguard secrecy (even the Tsarina could not find out when or where the attack would begin). Offensive trenches were dug deeper than usual and camouflaged by a novel device of spraying the ground with paint. Assault tunnels were built under the Austrian barbed wire to within a hundred yards of their lines, so that when the assault was launched the first wave of attackers could reach their trenches in one rush. The enemy's positions were carefully studied with the benefit of aerial photography. This enabled Brusilov to build full-scale models of the Austrian trenches and train his assault troops on them. It also meant that when the offensive began the Russians knew the precise location of the Austrian batteries and, in some places, even of individual machine-guns. Despite its inferior numbers, the Russian artillery thus had the one decisive advantage of knowing its targets, and this was to ensure the offensive's initial success.47
The offensive began on 4 June, in Brusilov's words, 'with a thunderous artillery barrage all along the South- Western Front'. 'The entire zone of battle was covered by a huge, thick cloud of dust and smoke,' an Austrian officer wrote, which 'allowed the Russians to come over the ruined wire-obstacles in thick waves and into our trenches.' Within forty-eight hours the Russians had broken through the Austrian defences along a fifty-mile front, capturing more than
40,000 prisoners. By day nine the number had risen to 200,000 men, more than half the Habsburg forces on the Eastern Front, and Conrad, the Austrian Chief of Staff, was starting to talk of the need to sue for peace.48
If Evert and Kuropatkin had followed up Brusilov's advance with their own promised attacks on the Western and North-Western Fronts, the enemy might have been pushed back and the course of the war changed entirely. Hindenburg later confessed that with a second offensive, 'We [would have been] faced with the menace of a complete collapse.' According to the original war plan, Brusilov's Front was considered secondary to both Evert's and Kuroptakin's. Yet neither of them was prepared to attack. To be fair, their task would have been much harder than Brusilov's. For they would have had to fight the German troops, which were much stronger than the Austro- Hungarian forces whom Brusiloy had overcome on the South-Western Front. But their vanity was also a factor: the increased risk of defeat made them all the more afraid of losing their own precious reputations. Perhaps the real blame lay with Stavka. Alexeev had served under Kuropatkin and Evert during the Japanese War and was still too frightened of them to force them to attack. The Tsar also indulged the cowardly generals — they were the favourites of his court — and ignored Brusilov's daily requests to order an offensive. The Tsarina was partly behind this. She bombarded her indecisive husband with Rasputin's 'expert' advice against an offensive in the north 'because', in his words, 'if our successes in the south continue, then they [the Germans] will themselves retreat in the north'.49
Such military stupidity was largely to blame for the slow-down of Brusilov's advance. Instead of starting a second offensive Stavka transferred troops from the north to Brusilov's Front. They were not enough to maintain the momentum of his offensive, however, since the Germans, with their position eased by the inactivity of Evert and Kuropatkin, were also able to transfer reinforcements to the south. Conscious of his declining advantage, Brusilov now reverted to orthodox tactics, advancing towards Kovel but fighting, in his own words, 'at a lower pressure ... to spare my men as far as possible'. Slowly but surely, the Russian advance was grinding to a halt. In eight weeks of fighting Brusilov's armies had captured 425,000 men and a large part of Galicia; the enemy had been forced to withdraw troops from the Western Front, thus relieving pressure on Italy and the French at Verdun; while Romania, for what it was worth, was at last persuaded to join the war on the side of the Russians. Ludendorff called it 'the crisis in the East'. In 1918 he would pay the ultimate compliment to Brusilov's tactics by using them himself on the Western Front.50
Coming as it did after a long year of defeat in the east, and of bloody stalemate in the west, Brusilov's offensive turned him overnight into a hero not just in Russia but throughout the Allied countries. Giliarovsky wrote a collection of panegyric poems 'To Brusilov' which sold in their tens of thousands in leaflet
form. French and Italian composers dedicated cantatas, marches and songs to the war hero. And throughout Europe people flocked to see the film called
I received hundreds of telegrams congratulating and blessing me from every class of Russian society. Everyone would have his say; peasants, mechanics, aristocrats, the clergy, the intelligentsia, and the children in the schools, all wanted to let me know that the great heart of the country was beating in sympathy with the well-loved soldiers of my victorious armies.
Brusilov had shown that under competent commanders the imperial army was still capable of military success. Had it not been undermined by Stavka, his offensive might have served as the springboard for the restoration of the army's morale — perhaps even one day leading towards its eventual victory. But it is doubtful whether even this would have been enough to save the tsarist regime, such was the extent of the political crisis in the country at large. In any case, with the failure of the offensive it now became clearer than ever, even to a monarchist like Brusilov, that, in his own words, 'Russia could not win the war with its present system of government.'51 Victory would not stop the revolution; but only a revolution could help bring about victory.
For Brusilov the final damning proof of the old regime's incompetence had come at the start of July, when Alexeev transferred the elite Imperial Guards to his Front in a last desperate bid to save the offensive. These young blue-bloods were described by Knox as 'physically the finest human animals in Europe'. In their dark-green parade uniforms, trimmed with golden braid, each guard stood over six feet tall. But they came with a gormless commander, General Bezobrazov, another favourite of the court, who disobeyed Brusilov's orders and sent them into attack through an exposed swamp. As the warriors waded chest-high through the mud, the German planes flew overhead, raking them with their machine-guns. Knox watched in horror as the planes swooped down to hit their targets and 'the wounded sank slowly into the marsh'.52 In one stupid action the core of the country's finest fighting force had been lost, and with it the final chance of victory under the old regime.
