The Russian Eighth Army in the First World War

The Russian Eighth Army, known as Brusilov’s army, was one of the most effective armies that Russia put into the field in this war. For its first year and a half it was commanded by Aleksei Brusilov, who led it across eastern Galicia into the Carpathians and in 1915 withdrew it to Volhynia without being encircled. In June 1916 it was this army that broke the front at Lutsk in the offensive that was the Russian army’s greatest victory of the war. In July of the following year it won the only success of the last Russian offensive, and at the beginning of 1918 it ceased to exist.

Brusilov in Galicia (1914)

The army was formed in the first days of the war from the staff and troops of the Odessa Military District. There was not even a plan for forming its headquarters. The army’s quartermaster-general, Anton Denikin, recalled that its command was appointed by telegram on the first day of mobilisation and that the rest of the officers were gathered in haste. When the fighting began it had the VII, VIII, XII and XXIV Corps and five cavalry divisions, and it formed the left wing of the South-Western Front of General Nikolai Ivanov.

In the second half of August the army crossed the border river Zbruch and in the Battle of Galicia, together with the Third Army, defeated the Austrians on the Złota Lipa and then on the Gniła Lipa. Brusilov believed that without his march south of Lviv the city would not have been given up without a fight. At the beginning of September his troops took Halicz. When the Austrians struck from the west at Gródek, the main weight of the attack fell on the Eighth Army, but the front held.

Brusilov’s army included commanders whom Russia would hear of later. The VIII Corps was commanded by Radko Dimitriev, the 48th Infantry Division by Lavr Kornilov, the 12th Cavalry Division by Aleksei Kaledin, and in September Denikin took over the “Iron” 4th Rifle Brigade. In the autumn the army spent three weeks beating off Austro-Hungarian attacks at Chyrów, in November it went into the Carpathians, where Kornilov’s division went down against orders as far as the Hungarian plain at Humenné and had to fight its way back, and part of its forces fought in December at Limanowa.

The Carpathians and the retreat (1915)

In the winter the Eighth Army fought hard battles in the snows of the Winter Battle in the Carpathians, beating off the Austrian attempts to relieve Przemyśl. In April, with reinforcements freed by the fortress’s surrender, it took the ridges of the Beskids, but it no longer had the strength to advance further.

After the breakthrough at Gorlice in May 1915 it had to come down from the mountains. Kornilov’s division, covering the retreat, was surrounded near Dukla, and the wounded general was taken prisoner. On the San Brusilov took over two corps of the shattered Third Army and the Przemyśl garrison, but he could not hold the fortress. After the loss of Lviv on 22 June he withdrew in good order to Volhynia, avoiding encirclement. At the end of September Denikin’s division retook Lutsk for a few days, and in October the army briefly took Czartorysk on the Styr.

The retreat also had a dark side. Brusilov repeatedly pressed for the deportation of German colonists from Volhynia, claiming that they were destroying telegraph lines. In the autumn of 1915 even old men, widows and the mothers of fallen soldiers were being deported.

Kaledin and Lutsk (1916)

At the end of March 1916 Brusilov took over the South-Western Front, and Kaledin took over the Eighth Army. It was given the main blow of the Brusilov Offensive. On 4 June the artillery opened fire, and on 5 June the infantry broke through the front of the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army west of Olyka. On 7 June the Russians entered Lutsk. Among the victors was Denikin’s “Iron” division, which was taking Lutsk for the second time. On the whole of Brusilov’s front Austria-Hungary lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers within a few weeks, more than a quarter of a million of them as prisoners.

The victory was not exploited. Kaledin advanced cautiously, and instead of on Lviv Brusilov directed the army on Kovel, the railway junction that linked his front with the Western Front. In July the Eighth Army reached the Stokhid together with the Third Army, and in August and September, reinforced by the Guard, it attacked in the marshes south of Kovel. According to Russian studies, in the September fighting the army and the Guard took only two villages at a cost of about 30 thousand men. Kovel was not taken.

Kornilov and the end (1917–1918)

After the February Revolution Kaledin opposed the Provisional Government’s reforms in the army and lost his command in May 1917, and Kornilov took over the army. In the July Kerensky Offensive its task was only to pin down the enemy south of the Dniester, yet it won the only clear success. From 6 July it broke the front of the Austro-Hungarian Third Army west of Stanisławów, took about 10 thousand prisoners, captured Halicz and on 11 July Kałusz. The volunteer shock detachment of Captain Mitrofan Nezhentsev, the nucleus of the later Kornilov Regiment, distinguished itself in this fighting. On the swollen Łomnica it was stopped by German reinforcements and by refusals to fight in its own ranks. By Austrian estimates it lost almost 40 thousand soldiers.

When on 19 July the Germans broke the front between Zborów and Zwyżeń, in the Counter-offensive in Eastern Galicia, the Eighth Army fell back too. Kornilov took over the whole front, and General Vladimir Cheremisov took over the army. Kornilov ordered Cheremisov to hold Czernowitz for at least six days so that the large military stores in the city could be taken away, but at the beginning of August the Eighth Army gave it up for good. In August it passed to the Romanian Front, and at the end of the year its headquarters was at Mogilev-Podolsky. The army was disbanded in January 1918, but the demobilisation of its troops went on until March, and some of its units later joined the Red Army.