Historians have treated the Tsarist army of World War I pretty roughly over the years. They have portrayed its officer corps as incompetent, its manpower as illiterate, and its logistics as wholly inadequate for the prosecution of modern war. Indeed, its wartime record was a parade of disasters at the hands of the Germans: the encirclement of an entire army at Tannenberg in 1914; the blasting open of its defensive front during the Gorlice-Tarnów offensive in 1915, which led to a 300-mile retreat and the evacuation of Poland; and of course, the dissolution of the entire force (and the state that it supported) in the revolutionary year of 1917. But one who reads this depressing list carefully will note the absence of 1916. In the summer of that year, with the western front locked in the horrors of trench warfare at Verdun and the Somme, the Russian army had its day in the sun, launching one of the war's most successful offensives. It was a blow that shattered the Austrian army and might have destroyed it altogether if it were not for emergency German reinforcements. The operation was named for the man who conceived, planned, and executed it, the commander of the Russian Southwestern Front, General Aleksei Brusilov.

In Timothy C. Dowling's view, Brusilov's victory deserves more attention than historians have given it. Unfortunately, the difficulties inherent in the topic—including a vast and obscure theater stretching south from the Pripet Marshes through Bukovina to the Romanian border, a cavalcade of tongue-twisting place and personal names (indeed, we read here of Letschitski driving on Czernovitz and Scherbatschev driving on Stanislau), and closed archives—have all conspired to keep the Brusilov offensive out of the English-language scholarly mainstream. The failed British offensive taking place along the Somme at the same time, by contrast, generated a formidable historiography. Those who were interested in Brusilov, however, had to consult Norman Stone's The Eastern Front (1975), or even Winston Churchill's The Unknown War (1931), both of which covered the entire war and dealt with the offensive in a single chapter.

Dowling therefore makes a major contribution to our knowledge of the war, as well as a forceful argument on behalf of Brusilov's generalship. The offensive, unlike every other great battle of the war up to 1916, opened with hardly any preparatory bombardment, and again, the contrast to what was happening on the Somme is striking. There, the thunder of the guns lasted for weeks and served to do little but alert the German defenders that an offensive was coming; the opening British assault waves were shot to pieces as a result. In the east, however, the Austrian armies were practically oblivious to the blow about to land.

Adding to the impact of the surprise were Brusilov's painstaking preparations: aerial photography of the Austrian defenses; the creation of a model of the Austrian lines for training the assault troops; arraying the attack in four sequential echelons; and paying careful attention to the cooperation of infantry and artillery (Dowling speaks of a “primitive kind of unified arms combat”). Faced with the onslaught, the Austrians did what many other soldiers have done in similar, dire straits. They surrendered in droves, sometimes by entire brigades, and soon there was a gaping hole where the Austrian army had been, a rare occurrence on any front in this war. Eventually, the Russians would take some 350,000 prisoners of war, and total Austrian casualties for the entire campaign would be somewhere around 600,000, about two thirds of its total strength at the time. The low quality of the opposition should not obscure the magnitude of Brusilov's victory. That it took place within the context of a broad front offensive with rough numerical parity on both sides makes it even more remarkable.

Dowling gives us all of this in spades. His Brusilov is a paragon, “the best Russian commander of the war,” a man knowledgeable in western military thought, “less rigid in his thinking” than the conservative graduates of the General Staff Academy and “more willing to consider new approaches.” He is even “dashing.” While Dowling stops short of constructing any sort of superman here, certain questions do arise in the course of reading this book. One might argue, for example (and many have), that Brusilov's decision to dispense with a massive opening bombardment was not a function of any particular military insight; he simply lacked the guns, and so found a way to make a virtue out of necessity. Once the Germans intervened and the front stabilized in August, Brusilov suddenly looked very much like a typical general of the war, launching massed infantry formations in clumsy frontal assaults and suffering immense casualties. Thus, while he did shatter the Austrians and begin the process that would end with the dissolution of the Habsburg state, he may well have been equally responsible for shattering his own army and the Tsarist regime in the process. While Dowling never gives a detailed listing of Russian casualties for the Brusilov offensive alone, the partial listings are staggering enough: 495,000 for the first week of July alone, two million (including a million dead) for the entire army in the summer of 1916. These numbers are horrendous enough to call anyone's military skills—including Brusilov's—into question.

Finally, it should be pointed out that this is a book with a fairly relentless operational focus. There is much talk of Clausewitz today within the community of military historians, but the Prussian sage's oft-quoted link between war and its political aims is hardly to be found here. Outside of its impact in bringing the Romanians into the war (a net minus for the Allies), Brusilov's achievement turned out to be a purely technical affair. Mere months after his bloody victory on the Southwestern Front, the Romanov dynasty he served would vanish altogether from the historical stage.

These points of discussion notwithstanding, Dowling has written a fine and important book, one that forces us to reconsider our view of the Russian army in World War I, and one that any student of the war can read with profit.