On the eve of the offensive Brusilov warned Kerensky of his growing doubts. Troops were refusing to move up to the Front. Dozens of mutinies had taken place in army garrisons to the rear and even where units were moved up to the trenches three-quarters of the men were likely to desert en route. The front-line soldiers had also mutinied when they discovered what lay ahead. Brusilov had been forced to disband a number of his most reliable units. In the Fifth Army on the Northern Front soldiers refused to carry out orders and declared that Lenin was the only authority they would recognize: 23,000 of them had to be transferred to other units or sent to the rear for military trial. But Kerensky ignored all the warnings of his army chief. ‘He paid not the slightest attention to my words,’ Brusilov recalled, ‘and from that moment on, I realized that my own authority as the Commander-in-Chief was quite irrelevant.’23 Kerensky and his cabinet colleagues had made up their minds: the offensive was to go ahead and there was no room for last-minute doubts.
On 16 June the offensive began with a two-day heavy artillery bombardment. Kerensky hurried from regiment to regiment giving out orders and trying to raise morale. On 18 June the troops moved forward, encouraged by the sight of the German trenches abandoned under fire. The main attack was aimed towards Lvov in the south, while supporting offensives were also launched on the Western and Northern Fronts. For two days the advance continued. The German lines were broken and a glorious ‘Triumph for Liberty!’ was heralded in the patriotic press. Then, on the third day, the advance came to a halt, the Germans began to counter-attack, and the Russians fled in panic. It was partly a case of the usual military failings: units had been sent into battle without machine-guns; untrained soldiers had been ordered to engage in complex manœuvres using hand grenades and ended up throwing them without first pulling the pins. But the main reason for the fiasco was the simple reluctance of the soldiers to fight. Having advanced two miles, the front-line troops felt they had done their bit and refused to go any further, while those in the second line would not take their places. The advance thus broke down as the men began to run away. In one night alone the shock battalions of the Eleventh Army arrested 12,000 deserters near the town of Volochinsk. Many soldiers turned their guns against their commanding officers rather than fight against the enemy. The retreat degenerated into chaos as soldiers looted shops and stores, raped peasant girls and murdered Jews. The crucial advance towards Lvov soon collapsed when the troops discovered a large store of alcohol in the abandoned town of Koniukhy and stopped there to get drunk. By the time they were fit to resume fighting three days and a hangover later, enemy reinforcements had arrived, and the Russians, suffering heavy losses, were forced to retreat.24
Amidst such chaos, even the shock troops stood little chance of success. Bochkareva’s Battalion of Death did much better than most. The women volunteers broke through the first two German lines, followed by some of the sheepish male conscripts. But then they came under heavy German fire. The women dispersed in confusion, while most of the men stayed put in the German trenches, where they had found a large supply of liquor and proceeded to get drunk. Despite the shambles around her, Bochkareva battled on. At one point she came across one of her women having sexual intercourse with a soldier in a shell-hole. She ran her through with a bayonet; but the soldier escaped. Eventually, with most of her volunteers killed or wounded, even Bochkareva was forced to retreat.25 The offensive was over. It was Russia’s last.
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The collapse of the offensive dealt a fatal blow to the Provisional Government and the personal authority of its leaders. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed. Millions of square miles of territory were lost. The leaders of the government had gambled everything on the offensive in the hope that it might rally the country behind them in the national defence of democracy. The coalition had been based upon this hope; and it held together as long as there was a chance of military success. But as the collapse of the offensive became clear, so the coalition fell apart.
