The Dniester in the First World War

The Dniester, the main river of Eastern Galicia, marked the southern wing of the Eastern Front throughout the war. In 1914–1917 the Russian and Austro-Hungarian armies crossed it several times in both directions, and long battles were fought for the crossings at Żurawno, Halicz and Zaleszczyki. On the Dniester the Russian offensive of June 1916 broke through the front at once, and in the summer of 1917 the last retreat of the Russian army from Galicia began here. In 1918 the lower course of the river became the border of Bessarabia, united with Romania.

A river of two empires

The Dniester rises on the northern slopes of the Carpathians and flows into the Black Sea a few miles south-west of Odessa. According to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, the first 350 miles of its course belonged to Austria and the remaining 515 miles to Russia. In its upper and middle course it flowed through Austrian Galicia, whose main river it was, and then through Russian Podolia and Bessarabia. It had a swift current and two floods a year: one in spring when the ice broke up, and one in summer when the snows melted in the Carpathians. At Zaleszczyki its left bank belonged to Galicia and its right bank to Bukovina.

The Galician crossings (1914–1915)

In the Battle of Galicia in 1914 the front stretched from the Vistula to the Dniester. The Russians broke the Austro-Hungarian defence on the Złota Lipa and the Gniła Lipa, two tributaries of the Dniester, and took Lviv, and at the beginning of September General Aleksei Brusilov’s 8th Army captured Halicz on the Dniester. In the winter of 1915 the Austro-Hungarian troops of General Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin retook Czernowitz and took Stanisławów, but on 4 March the Russians recovered that town, and the front came to a halt on the Dniester and the Prut. The bridgehead at Zaleszczyki, an important crossing over the river, was held by the Russians despite repeated assaults.

After the breakthrough at Gorlice in May 1915 the Russian supreme command ordered the line of the San and the Dniester to be held at all costs. General Alexander von Linsingen’s German–Austro-Hungarian South Army reached the river in the Battle of the Stryj and on 5 June seized the crossing at Żurawno, but a Russian counter-attack drove it from the bridgehead back across the Dniester. On 15 June the Austro-Hungarian 7th Army took the Russian bridgehead at Niżniów. The Russians went on defending the river even after the loss of Lviv. Only on the morning of 23 June, in thick fog, did the South Army cross between Żurawno and Halicz, and on 27 June the Austrians took Halicz without a fight. From the autumn the front ran north of the river along the Strypa, and further east along the Dniester towards Bukovina.

The Brusilov offensive (1916)

On 4 June 1916 the Brusilov offensive began, and on the Dniester General Platon Lechitsky’s Russian 9th Army broke through the front of the Austro-Hungarian 7th Army at once. On 10 June the Russians broke through the positions at the village of Okna and announced that they had taken over 18,000 prisoners that day. In the night of 10 to 11 June the Austrians abandoned the bridgehead at Zaleszczyki, which the Russians then entered. By mid-June, according to the Austrian official history, the 7th Army had lost 133,600 men, more than half its strength, and on 18 June the Russians took Czernowitz. In August the Russian Stavka decided that the best chance of success lay south of the Dniester, and on 11 August Lechitsky’s army entered Stanisławów.

The last retreat (1917)

In July 1917, in the Kerensky Offensive, General Lavr Kornilov’s 8th Army attacked south of the Dniester from 6 July. It broke through the front at Stanisławów and took Halicz and Kałusz, but German reinforcements stopped it on the swollen Łomnica. After the German breakthrough at Złoczów, in the counter-offensive in Eastern Galicia, on 22 July the whole Russian front from the Seret to the Dniester began to retreat. At the end of July the Hungarian 38th Honvéd Division took the bridgehead at Zaleszczyki, and on 3 August the Central Powers entered Czernowitz.

The border of Bessarabia (1917–1918)

On the lower Dniester the war ended later. Bessarabia, the land between the Prut and the Dniester, which had belonged to Russia since 1812, was proclaimed the Moldavian Democratic Republic on 15 December 1917 by the provincial council in Kishinev. In January 1918 Romanian troops entered it, and in February the fighting with Soviet units moved to the Dniester, near Bendery. On 9 April 1918 Bessarabia united with Romania. From then on the Dniester divided Romania from Ukraine, which did not recognise this division, and between the wars it was the Romanian–Soviet border.