As much as anything, World War I turned on the fate of Ukraine...

Without Ukraine’s population, industry, and agriculture, early twentieth-century Russia would have ceased to be a great power. If Russia ceased to be a great power, then there was every possibility that Germany would dominate Europe.

Dominic Lieven¹

In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close.

Sun Tzu²

The nineteenth century’s industrial revolution, Europe’s population ex­plosion, and the emergence of mass politics helped unify Germany and Italy and hastened the Ottoman Empire’s decay. The building of mass armies and their support systems spurred the creation of two rival military coalitions, the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) and the Triple Entente (Great Britain, France, and the Russian Empire) by the turn of the twentieth century (see map 4). The subsequent naval race be­tween Germany and Great Britain, and conflicts in the Balkans among Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and Serbia aggravated tensions among the major powers and set the stage for the world’s first total war. The assassination of Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Archduchess Sophie, on 28 June 1914 ignited the conflict.

In response to these political murders, the Habsburg Monarchy de­clared war against Serbia on 28 July. This act transformed the Austrian- Serbian conflict from a local war to a European one, ultimately involving all of the world’s major powers. Serbia’s ally, Imperial Russia, mobilized its armed forces on 30 July, reaffirming its role as the defender of all Slavs. Germany then marshalled troops on 1 August and implemented the von Schlieffen plan, a highly intricate blueprint to defeat France (Russia’s pri­mary ally) and then smash the Russian Empire - all to prevent a two-front war.

All of the belligerents fought to protect, if not enhance, their own na­tional and imperial interests, but simultaneously they sincerely believed that “they were waging war because it would bring a new and radiant world into the future.” This armageddon would redeem humanity and create “a purified world rid of a central flaw: war.” Europe’s political and military elites adopted this vision long before the popularization of President Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 declaration that the conflict represented “a war to end all wars.”⁴

By November 1914, just as the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers, troops on the western front became entrenched in a brutal ground war. Generals and politicians on both sides introduced unprecedented forms of violence to break the stalemate. Universal conscription generated “ever more apocalyptic confrontations, as the increased ease with which soldiers could be replaced led to ever bloodier fighting.”⁵

The “messianic intensity of the war” produced hundreds of thousands, even millions, of casualties in a single battle without any significant break- through.⁶ The first battle of the Marne (September 1914), the Gallipoli campaign (April 1915-January 1916), the battle of Verdun (February- December 1916), the Brusilov offensive (June-September 1916), the battle of the Somme (July-November 1916), the third battle of Ypres (July- November 1917), and the German spring offensive of 1918 each killed or wounded at least 500,000 soldiers.⁷ The armed conflict between the two military alliances became a mechanized mass killing machine that lasted more than four years.

Austria’s short-lived thrust into Russian Poland on 19 September 1914 induced the Russian army to counter-attack, advancing nearly 300 kilo­metres into Austria-Hungary and occupying Eastern Galicia and part of Western Galicia.⁸ Within six months of the war’s beginning, the Austro- Hungarian army had lost over 1,250,000 men. and by March 1915 another 800,000.⁹ But the Dual Monarchy’s offensive in the spring of 1915 succeed­ed, and Austro-Hungarian troops expelled the tsarist army from Galicia.

As the Russian army withdrew, its generals initiated a “scorched earth” policy and forcibly removed several hundred thousand Austro-Hungarian civilians, including women and children, back behind their own lines. By the end of 1915, the Russian army had lost about four million men (killed, wounded, missing, and taken prisoner).¹⁰ In June 1916, the Russian army redirected its attacks on the southwestern front in the direction of Galicia and reoccupied this territory a second time and for nearly a year.

By the end of the winter of 1916-17, the Russian army’s morale had plunged to an all-time low; the generals no longer trusted the conscripts they commanded. Food shortages in the major industrial cities aggravated the situation. With an early spring thaw in late February 1917, hungry men and women participated in mass demonstrations in Petrograd against their own government. With the outbreak of street violence, instigated by the local police and military command, rank-and-file soldiers refused to shoot at the protesters and joined them. Facing a complete breakdown of the Russian political order during a major war, members of Russia’s last par­liament, the Fourth Duma, persuaded Nicholas II to abdicate.¹¹

Immediately after the February Revolution in Petrograd, the new Provisional Government pledged to continue the war “solely for the de­fense of the Russian homeland,” but the majority of the troops did not share this outlook.

Despite this breakdown within its military ranks, Russia’s Provisional Government initiated another offensive on the southwestern front in late June 1917; a swift German counter-attack stopped this effort. After a loss of 200,000 troops in one week, the Russian army melted away. Soldiers “voted with their feet,” taking weapons with them. They rushed back to their villages in order to claim a “fair share” of the land for themselves and their families.

The Russian and Austrian empires constituted the weakest links within the two competing military alliances. As large, multinational dynastic em­pires, they did not adjust well to the ever-increasing demands of the war. Russia’s geographic isolation from its allies, bureaucratic mismanagement, and political backwardness brought defeat. Nicholas II and his subordinates could not imagine, much less implement, policies which would unify the military and home fronts. He and his inner circle never established a govern­ment of national unity, as did Britain, France, and Germany. The tsar con­sidered any compromise of his political authority as an erosion of his autocratic power. In his narrow view of the world, reinforcing the autocracy remained the only strategy for Russian victory.¹²

At the start of hostilities, Nicholas’s military entourage demonstrated a reckless level of incompetence by failing to equip recruits with enough rifles, ammunition, or boots. Russia’s political leadership ignored public opinion, while Austria feared “imposing any strain on the doubtful loy­alty of its population” and “barely attempted to plan a siege economy or to administer a rationing system.”¹³ Both empires introduced policies that alienated the very people whose support they needed to win the war. In the new era of total war, both empires collapsed.