And this is actually a little, this is an interesting fact of history. This interim government all of a sudden becomes a democracy. This is February Remember, the United States has not entered the war at this point. But you might also remember that in April, the United States uses the idea of fighting on the side of democracy as a justification for entering the war.
Which is very nice, because by April, all of the major powers on the side of the, I guess you would say, the Triple Entente, they were all democracies. You're talking about, now, the interim government for the Russians. You have the French. And you have the British Empire. Obviously, it's a democracy only for those who are voting. And actually the United States was the first country to recognize the interim government after the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II.
But we're not just done with The situation continues to deteriorate. And it starts to deteriorate, as well, for the army. The morale and the troops breakdown. You start having, the Bolsheviks start to create unrest.
By the end of , now we're talking about September So that's maybe right around here. You have the Central Powers. Germany's able to capture Riga, which is a major city right over here on the Baltic. Which brings the Central Powers very, very close to the Russian capital. It contributes to the ongoing unrest that's going on. And so in November 7, you have coup d'etat of that ostensibly democratic interim government, provisional government. And you have the communists take power.
You have the Bolsheviks take power under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin right over here. So November 7, , very famous date in history. You have the Bolsheviks. So this is Lenin leading the Bolsheviks into power. Now, they were in no interest to continue fighting this battle with Germany. They had their own civil war to worry about.
They were trying to consolidate power in Russia. So in December, they essentially get into, start to negotiate an armistice with the Central Powers. And they did not have a lot of leverage in this negotiation because they weren't, they really did not want to be in this war. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in which the Russians, because they were so desperate, the Bolsheviks were so desperate in order to get, to focus on the internal civil war that had emerged in Russia, in order to consolidate power, they gave over a huge amount of territory to the Central Powers.
And essentially a large part of European Russia that is not predominantly-- of Russian ethnicity went over to the Central Powers. Now this treaty is important because it essentially was the end of World War I for the Russians.
It essentially was the end of the Eastern Front. And it allowed the Germans to then refocus on the Western Front, which allowed the Germans to start bringing troops back over to the Western Front.
And they were actually able to do quite an aggressive Spring Offensive on the Western Front. And if it wasn't for the US at the time, now being able to reinforce the Western Front-- remember, they declared war in mid it's not clear that the German offensive might not have been successful in the spring of So the importance of Brest-Litovsk is it was the end of the Eastern Front.
It allowed the Germans to do an offensive on the Western Front. And it was a very strong offensive. But with the help of the Americans, it was not a successful one. But the actual territorial gains for the Central Power of Brest-Litovsk-- I'm sure I'm mispronouncing it-- were not that significant. Because in November and here I'm probably falling off my timeline a little bit. In the chaotic flight to the rear, soldiers shot their officers and simply began walking home. For all intents and purposes, Russia disposed of no organized military force south of the Pripet Marshes.
The counter-offensive nonetheless ground to a halt at the Galician border. Austria-Hungary had no further reserves to dedicate to the attack, and the Germans needed every available man on the Western Front. For the moment, Russia was spared. Ludendorff, however, was determined to drive Russia from the war and free up some of the eighty German battalions that remained on the Eastern Front.
Shifting his artillery north, Ludendorff ordered an attack on Riga; if that city fell, he reasoned, the road to Petrograd would be open and Russia would be forced to conclude peace. General Oskar von Hutier's Eighth Army took the city two days later; anticipating the attack, General Vladislav Klembovsky had withdrawn his Twelfth Army several weeks earlier, leaving only a skeleton force to defend Riga.
Ludendorff thus failed to achieve his strategic objective of forcing a Russian surrender directly. The fall of Riga, however, triggered a dramatic power struggle within Russia.
General Lavr Kornilov , who had replaced Brusilov as chief of staff in August, demanded that Kerensky by this time the head of the increasingly weak Provisional Government transfer power to him in order to deflect the impending crisis. Kerensky refused, and Kornilov began moving his army toward Petrograd. Feeling betrayed by the army, Kerensky turned for support to the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin , which only recently had been suppressed for an attempted coup of its own, the so-called July Days.
The Bolsheviks, with Leon Trotsky's Red Guard now armed and enjoying a reputation as the defenders of revolutionary democracy, staged a nearly bloodless coup on the night of November. Kerensky fled the capital. Lenin suggested a truce on all fronts to be followed by negotiations, which the British, French, and Americans rejected. Germany, on the other hand, was eager to settle the war and opened unilateral talks with the new Bolshevik government on 3 December at Brest-Litovsk. They agreed on an armistice, which took effect on 17 December, but little else.
Trotsky somewhat naively expected the Germans to negotiate on the basis of no annexations and no indemnities; the Germans instead put forth harsh territorial demands. After signing a separate peace treaty with Ukraine , Germany marched its armies into the areas vacated by the deserted Russian soldiers, including the Baltics.
Violence continued almost unabated for the next four years, however, as the various states and populations fought for power.
Russia devolved into civil war , with parties of all stripes including socialist trying to moderate or overthrow the Bolshevik regime. A three-way struggle evolved in the Ukraine, with Russians fighting Ukrainian nationalists, and anarchists under Nestor Makhno fighting both. The Allies perpetuated the chaos and violence of the Eastern Front as well, as they refused to accept the Bolshevik withdrawal.
Italy, Romania, Greece, and Serbia also provided small troop contingents, while France supplied funding for Russian forces fighting the Bolsheviks. The Allies also hoped to deny, at least, the vast resources of Ukraine and central Russia to the Germans. Thus while Hindenburg and Ludendorff transferred forty divisions to the Western Front they also, significantly, left almost as many to manage the occupation and exploit the resources of the areas gained.
The war on the Eastern Front thus continued to influence developments in the West to a degree that, even today remains generally unrecognized. It may be, as scholars generally agree, that the war was and only could have been decided in the West; however, without the East that decision might have been very different. The sheer weight and surprising ability of the Russian Army to sustain military operations and inflict damage upon the Central Powers siphoned valuable resources from the German war effort.
In January , near the height of the German commitment to the Eastern Front, there were fifty-five German infantry divisions and nine German cavalry divisions operating against Russia. As late as November , at the close of the war, there were still twenty-seven German infantry divisions deployed in the East. More than 1. While those numbers represent roughly only a quarter of the German forces deployed and the same proportion of casualties, they are not insignificant.
The timing and nature of German deployments was also critical. The Brusilov Offensive, for instance, drew as many as eight German divisions from the Western Front that might well have been used at Verdun. The occupation of Ukraine tied down thirty or forty divisions that might have enabled the Spring Ludendorff Offensives of to find success. All of these aspects, along with the development of the creeping barrage, the experiments with poison gas, and many others, may not have been decisive for the conflict as a whole, but they certainly contributed to the decision.
Dowling, Timothy C. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. DOI : Version 1. Eastern Front. By Timothy C. Timothy C. Jefferson , p. London , p. New York , p. Vienna , volume 2, p. Der Karpathendurchbruch und die Befreiung von Galizien. Leipzig , p. Bruce: Passage through Armageddon. The Russians in War and Revolution, Gildhorn, Fred: Vier Jahre an der Ostfront.
Herwig, Holger H. Martin's Press. Lee, John: The warlords. Lincoln, W. Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel: War land on the Eastern front. Nebelin, Manfred: Ludendorff. Diktator im Ersten Weltkrieg , Munich Siedler. Rauchensteiner, Manfried: Der Tod des Doppeladlers. Rothenberg, Gunther E. Rutherford, Ward: The Tsar's war, Sanborn, Joshua A. Showalter, Dennis: Tannenberg. Clash of empires , Dulles Potomac Books Inc.. Architect of the apocalypse , Boston Humanities Press.
Stoff, Laurie: They fought for the motherland. Torrey, Glenn E. Citation Dowling, Timothy C. Metadata Subjects. Author Keywords. GND Subject Headings. LC Subject Headings. Rameau Subject Headings. Regional Section s. Thematic Section s. Images Austrian troops entering L'viv, Aleksei Alekseevich Brusilov Cossacks departing for the front, Erich von Falkenhayn August von Mackensen Hindenburg and Ludendorff.
German infantry on the march, Aleksandr Fedorovich Kerenskii Austro-Russian battleground around Przemysl, postcard. Transport of fresh supplies through a ford in Galicia, Austrian trenches in the Carpathians. Alexei Andreyevich Polivanov Die Russenfalle bei den Masurischen Seen.
Sieges-Sonne im Osten, Hindenburg, postcard. A trench near Smorgon. Map of the Brusilov Offensive, Map of the Eastern Front, Signing of the armistice of Brest-Litovsk, The Soviets were more accustomed to the chill, and used specially designed rifles, skis and camouflage to continue fighting even in some of the most inhospitable conditions.
The annual deep freeze proved to be a thorn in the side of the German armies for the rest of the war, but the warmer months were only nominally better. Soviet-era Communism tended to embrace the equality of the sexes, and perhaps nowhere was this more apparent than in the attitude toward female soldiers.
Nearly one million Soviet women took up arms and served on the front lines of World War II as anti-aircraft gunners, snipers, partisan guerrillas and even fighter pilots.
More than simply providing the Red Army with an unanticipated boost in numbers, female troops eventually earned a reputation as some of the fiercest fighters on the Eastern Front.
Among others, ace pilots Lydia Litvyak and Yekaterina Budanova each downed around a dozen German planes, and sharpshooter Lyudmila Pavlichenko singlehandedly killed more than enemy soldiers. Anxious to prove their worth in combat, women regularly signed up for some of the most hazardous combat positions.
According to some estimates, Soviet barrier troops may have killed as many as , of their own men over the course of the war, including some 15, during the Battle of Stalingrad.
The Eastern Front is best known for the multi-year Siege of Leningrad and the bloody Battle of Stalingrad, but it was also the site of the largest armored confrontation of all time. The campaign began when the Germans set their sights on a mile-long salient, or bulge, in the Soviet lines in western Russia.
When the German offensive finally commenced, they were met by a storm of mines and artillery fire that eventually destroyed hundreds of tanks and left a total of some , men dead on both sides. Unable to match the Soviets in a contest of attrition, the Germans reluctantly withdrew from the region on July The retreat marked the last gasp of Nazi offensive operations in the East.
The struggle for the Eastern Front was bigger and costlier than the fighting in the West, but it was also significantly more brutal.
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