The Russian Eleventh Army in the First World War

The Russian Eleventh Army was an army of Russia formed in the autumn of 1914 to besiege the fortress of Przemyśl. Throughout the war it fought on the South-Western Front, in Galicia. In March 1915 it received the surrender of Przemyśl, then it fought in the Carpathians, on the Dniester and on the Seret, and in 1916, in the Brusilov offensive, it took Brody. In July 1917 it delivered the main blow of the last Russian offensive, and three weeks later it fell apart under a German counter-attack.

The army at Przemyśl (1914–1915)

After the failed assault on the fortress in the autumn of 1914 the Russians did not want to tie down their best field divisions at Przemyśl. They entrusted the blockade to a separate Siege Army, which in October was renamed the Eleventh Army. It was commanded by General Andrei Selivanov, a man of nearly seventy and a member of the State Council. Polish estimates put his forces, made up mainly of reserve divisions, at about 100,000 men and 300 guns. Russian historians point out that Selivanov directed the siege more in name than in fact, and that it was really conducted by Aleksei Brusilov and Dmitry Shcherbachev.

In the second siege, from November, the army did not storm the forts. It surrounded the fortress with a ring of trenches, cut it off from supplies and waited for the garrison to run out of food. In the winter the Austro-Hungarian relief attempts in the Winter Battle in the Carpathians cost hundreds of thousands of men and achieved nothing. On 19 March 1915 the garrison tried to break out, and on 22 March it blew up the forts and capitulated. About 117,000–120,000 soldiers went into captivity. It was the Russians’ greatest success since the Battle of Galicia, and the tsar awarded Selivanov the Order of St George.

The Carpathians and eastern Galicia (1915)

The troops freed from Przemyśl reinforced the Carpathian front. In April the ailing Selivanov was replaced by Shcherbachev, and the army took up a position in the foothills between Drohobycz and Dolina, facing the German–Austrian South Army. After the breakthrough at Gorlice it had to fall back together with the whole front. In the Battle of the Stryj the South Army took Stryj on 31 May and crossed the Dniester at Żurawno, but Shcherbachev, reinforced by the fresh VI Corps, threw it back across the river with a counter-attack on 8 and 9 June. It was one of the few Russian successes of those weeks.

In the summer the army fell back through eastern Galicia, making stands on the Gniła Lipa and on the Złota Lipa, until it halted on the Seret. In September it struck from the bridgeheads at Tarnopol and Trembowla, and the Battle of Tarnopol stopped the Central Powers’ offensive in eastern Galicia. According to a Russian award list, from the second half of August to October the army took almost 53,000 prisoners. In the autumn Shcherbachev took over the Seventh Army, and the Eleventh Army passed to General Vladimir Sakharov.

The Brusilov offensive (1916)

In the Brusilov offensive the Eleventh Army, standing at Tarnopol, was above all to pin down the enemy. On 4 June 1916 its VI Corps broke into the Hungarian trenches at Cebrów, but in night counter-attacks it lost almost everything it had gained. At Sapanów on the Ikva, however, the Russians took almost 3,000 prisoners, and the Austrians sent a reserve there, moving it away from Lutsk. On 28 July, when Brusilov renewed the attack, the Eleventh Army took Brody. In August he gave it the task of striking at Brzeżany, but his armies were already tired. In the autumn Sakharov took over the combined Russian and Romanian forces in Dobruja, and the Eleventh Army passed to General Vladislav Klembovsky.

Zborów and collapse (1917–1918)

After the February Revolution elected committees arose in the army. In April 1917 Nikolai Krylenko, later the Bolshevik commander-in-chief, became chairman of the Eleventh Army’s committee, but in May he lost support and had to step down. In June General Ivan Erdeli took over the army, and the war minister Alexander Kerensky roused the soldiers to fight at mass meetings.

In the plan of the Kerensky offensive it was the Eleventh Army that was to break the front on both sides of Zborów and advance through Złoczów on Lviv. Its artillery opened fire on 29 June, and on 1 July the VI and XLIX Corps broke through at Koniuchy, at the junction of the South Army and the Austro-Hungarian Second Army. The next day the Czechoslovak brigade fighting in its ranks attacked at Zborów; in the autumn its regiments formed the corps of the Czechoslovak Legion. In two days the army took over 14,000 prisoners and 31 guns. On 6 July an attack by the I Guards Corps broke against fresh German divisions, and the next day the army went over to the defensive. According to the Stavka it lost over 28,500 men, the most of all the front’s armies.

On 19 July the Germans and Austrians struck between Zborów and Zwyżeń. In the counter-offensive in eastern Galicia the Eleventh Army fell apart within two days: soldiers abandoned their trenches and refused to counter-attack, and whole corps left without a fight. Erdeli was replaced by General Pyotr Baluyev. Retreating soldiers looted Tarnopol, and the front commander, Lavr Kornilov, ordered such men to be shot without trial. On 25 July, the day Tarnopol fell, the government restored the death penalty at the front. The Russians halted only at the border, on the Zbrucz.

The defeat hastened the disintegration of the whole Russian army and undermined the authority of the Provisional Government, which the Bolsheviks overthrew a few months later. At the end of 1917 the Eleventh Army’s headquarters was at Proskurov. From January to March 1918 the army was demobilised and then disbanded.