Intensive preparations were made for the offensive. Nothing quite like it had ever been seen before. The key to Brusilov’s plan was surprise, so everything was done to safeguard secrecy (even the Tsarina could not find out when or where the attack would begin). Offensive trenches were dug deeper than usual and camouflaged by a novel device of spraying the ground with paint. Assault tunnels were built under the Austrian barbed wire to within a hundred yards of their lines, so that when the assault was launched the first wave of attackers could reach their trenches in one rush. The enemy’s positions were carefully studied with the benefit of aerial photography. This enabled Brusilov to build full-scale models of the Austrian trenches and train his assault troops on them. It also meant that when the offensive began the Russians knew the precise location of the Austrian batteries and, in some places, even of individual machine-guns. Despite its inferior numbers, the Russian artillery thus had the one decisive advantage of knowing its targets, and this was to ensure the offensive’s initial success.47
The offensive began on 4 June, in Brusilov’s words, ‘with a thunderous artillery barrage all along the South-Western Front’. ‘The entire zone of battle was covered by a huge, thick cloud of dust and smoke,’ an Austrian officer wrote, which ‘allowed the Russians to come over the ruined wire-obstacles in thick waves and into our trenches.’ Within forty-eight hours the Russians had broken through the Austrian defences along a fifty-mile front, capturing more than 40,000 prisoners. By day nine the number had risen to 200,000 men, more than half the Habsburg forces on the Eastern Front, and Conrad, the Austrian Chief of Staff, was starting to talk of the need to sue for peace.48
If Evert and Kuropatkin had followed up Brusilov’s advance with their own promised attacks on the Western and North-Western Fronts, the enemy might have been pushed back and the course of the war changed entirely. Hindenburg later confessed that with a second offensive, ‘We [would have been] faced with the menace of a complete collapse.’ According to the original war plan, Brusilov’s Front was considered secondary to both Evert’s and Kuroptakin’s. Yet neither of them was prepared to attack. To be fair, their task would have been much harder than Brusilov’s. For they would have had to fight the German troops, which were much stronger than the Austro-Hungarian forces whom Brusilov had overcome on the South-Western Front. But their vanity was also a factor: the increased risk of defeat made them all the more afraid of losing their own precious reputations. Perhaps the real blame lay with Stavka. Alexeev had served under Kuropatkin and Evert during the Japanese War and was still too frightened of them to force them to attack. The Tsar also indulged the cowardly generals — they were the favourites of his court — and ignored Brusilov’s daily requests to order an offensive. The Tsarina was partly behind this. She bombarded her indecisive husband with Rasputin’s ‘expert’ advice against an offensive in the north ‘because’, in his words, ‘if our successes in the south continue, then they [the Germans] will themselves retreat in the north’.49
Such military stupidity was largely to blame for the slow-down of Brusilov’s advance. Instead of starting a second offensive Stavka transferred troops from the north to Brusilov’s Front. They were not enough to maintain the momentum of his offensive, however, since the Germans, with their position eased by the inactivity of Evert and Kuropatkin, were also able to transfer reinforcements to the south. Conscious of his declining advantage, Brusilov now reverted to orthodox tactics, advancing towards Kovel but fighting, in his own words, ‘at a lower pressure … to spare my men as far as possible’. Slowly but surely, the Russian advance was grinding to a halt. In eight weeks of fighting Brusilov’s armies had captured 425,000 men and a large part of Galicia; the enemy had been forced to withdraw troops from the Western Front, thus relieving pressure on Italy and the French at Verdun; while Romania, for what it was worth, was at last persuaded to join the war on the side of the Russians. Ludendorff called it ‘the crisis in the East’. In 1918 he would pay the ultimate compliment to Brusilov’s tactics by using them himself on the Western Front.50
Coming as it did after a long year of defeat in the east, and of bloody stalemate in the west, Brusilov’s offensive turned him overnight into a hero not just in Russia but throughout the Allied countries. Giliarovsky wrote a collection of panegyric poems ‘To Brusilov’ which sold in their tens of thousands in leaflet form. French and Italian composers dedicated cantatas, marches and songs to the war hero. And throughout Europe people flocked to see the film called Brusilov. The General himself later wrote:
