The Eastern Front, 1914-1917

The book is written by a Cambridge and Oxford history scholar and professor Norman Stone and is perhaps the best single book on the Eastern Front during WWI. From reading the book it is easy to understand the author's enthusiasm for the subject when we see his degree of knowledge on the subject and all the details. Clearly the book was a work of love by the author. Although the book is just a 300 page paperback it is not a quick light read. There are 300 pages of main text and 20 pages of sources notes on four basic subjects, i.e.; introduction to the politics and war preparation, the military battles (which is the majority of the book), Russian economics, and finally a short section on the Russian revolution of 1917. As I said it is not a quick read; it took me over three weeks to read and some parts I had to read twice. Some parts were excellent for inducing sleep - especially all those Polish names and Russian Generals. Having said that some parts are slow, one can say that it is an excellent book. The crux of the author's arguments is that fate of the war on the Eastern Front was decided by poor Russian management of its economic resources along with a highly fractured and disorganized armed forces, not by and fundamental negative Russian economic factors. This poor Russian effort was further complicated by a weak infrastructure - especially railroads - in an otherwise fast growing Russian economy. Also, the Russians failed to recruit in large numbers, failed to keep pace with modern military developments, lacked officers in numbers, had poor training, and failed to develop good leadership, wasted many available resources, suffered from poor moral especially among the lower ranks, and in general failed to coordinate and properly plan military actions as for example between ground troops and artillery. During the years 1906 to 1914 the Russians spent enough money to cause worry in Germany outspending Germany in some years, but the money was not spent wisely (examples were too many fortress guns and too much cavalry) and there were still basis problems in the character and structure of Russian forces including the officers and both the tactical and strategic planning. The Russians did have a few successes as we read, but not enough. The first 43 pages is what I call part one and it covers various introductions by the author - with an update in 1997 - and then the military build up to the war including an economic and military analysis of Russia and to a lesser extent Germany and Austria in the period 1900 to 1914. By 1914 the war was already brewing among the different European colonial powers and is triggered by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand visiting Sarajevo on Sunday June 28, 1914. Initially it is a war between Austria and Serbia but it quickly evolved to include the central powers of Germany, Austria, and Hungary against the so called "Entente" or other European powers including France, Russia, and Britain and its col

This is the best single volume history of the Russian Front in WW I that there is. Period. It covers the war from 1914 to the collapse of Russia in 1917. In just over 300 pages the author manages to cover every significant military action, all the politic dealings, the economic problems, and the diplomacy which lead to the collapse of Russia. A truly superb book.

For most Americans, the First World War conjures up a single, brutal image: trench warfare along the western front in France. Tangles of barbed wire, machine gun nests, pockmarked no-man's-land, gas masks, stacks of mutilated cadavers, and mountains of expended artillery shells. The names Ypres, Flanders, Somme and Verdun are synonymous with horrifying and senseless slaughter of attrition. However, the western front and its "marquee" battles are just part of the story of the Great War.Norman Stone's "The Eastern Front, 1914-1917" shines the light of history on the "other front," a theater of battle that is still somewhat shrouded in mystery over 80 years after the last gun fell silent. What is perhaps most striking about the eastern front is how dissimilar it was from the engagements in the west. Although it consumed as many lives as the conflagration in the west, the primary military failure in the east wasn't the failure to recognize and leverage the strength of a defensive posture, but rather a failure to effectively exploit the offensive. Whilst the French, British and Germans settled into a defensive war of attrition, the Germans, Austrians and Russians continued in a war of maneuver. The eastern front was twice as long as that in the west with about half the artillery and poor railway networks to efficiently shift reserves to threatened areas. The great battles of the east (today familiar only to those with a keen interest in military history) such as Tannenberg, Lodz, Riga, Gorlice-Tarnow, and the Brusilov offensive, were largely offensive victories. The attrition in the east was caused by inadequate transportation and exhausted troops trying to fully exploit the offensive opportunities, not the attrition of withering firepower experienced in the west.It should be noted that the title (and cover) of this book is a bit misleading. This is a history of Tsarist Russia at war; it is not a history of the entire eastern theater. Major operations such as the central powers drive to crush Serbia in 1915, the multiple battles around Isonzo on the Italian/Austrian front, and the Entente's beach head at Salonika (to name just a few) are touched upon only tangentially. The narrative is delivered almost entirely from the Russian perspective.Stone's central argument is that Russia was much better equipped to fight the First World War than it is traditionally given credit for. Its decisive weaknesses were not an inability to produce artillery shells in large numbers, the ineffectiveness of its peasant soldiers, or the economic backwardness of the nation as a whole. Rather, these explanations are simply "hard luck" stories created by the Russian military officers themselves to hide the real source of failure: incompetence and poor organization. The Tsarist army, Stone says, was crippled by a political schism in its officer corps. There were two mutually exclusive camps in the Russian Army: those officers (mostly of middle class origin) wh

It's hard to believe that after over a quarter of a century, Stone's book remains the sole "big picture" reference on the Russian end of WWI. Showalter's Tannenberg concentrates on that campaign and few, if any, authors have ventured to say much new about the mobile war far to the east of the Franco-Belgian trench lines. Stone did not take the opportunity to update his classic for this Penguin re-issue. The book's structure could be more rigorous, as it tends to be a bit fragmented. However, Stone's analysis is penetrating. He doesn't simply hop from battle to battle but provides good coverage of economic and industrial factors underlying the campaigns. Thus, this book is still well worth consulting. It looks as though Hew Strachan's new three-volume treatment of the War will pay more attention to the East, but the first volume only runs to the end of 1914 and it may be some time before we see the succeeding entries. For the price, Stone provides plenty of data, backed by solid footnotes (though he didn't have access to ex-Soviet archives now available).

Norman Stone writes with gravitas and wit. This book is refreshing in its analysis and narrative,, and sometimes startles the reader with its razor- sharp insights. The Eastern Front during WW1 is often given second place, if any place at all, in histories of WW1. This book will cause any reader who has relied on "Dr Zhivago" and Marxist nonsense for an interpretation of the events in Eastern Europe between 1914 and 1917 to do a "volte face". Aside from content and style, the book is well worth reading just to receive instruction in thinking from Professor Stone. This is the kind of professor you wish you'd had for all of your university classes. I finished this book hoping that PRofessor Stone would apply his interests to many other areas of history, such as the American Civil War and WW2.