The Russian Army in the First World War: Rare Photographs from Wartime Archives

For 100 years little attention has been paid to the Russian army that fought the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians in the First World War on the Eastern Front. Yet the Tsar’s army played a critical part in the global conflict and was engaged in a sequence of shattering campaigns that were waged on a massive scale on several fronts across Eastern Europe.

Nik Cornish, in this heavily illustrated account, seeks to set the record straight. In a selection of almost 200 archive photographs he gives a graphic impression of the Russian army of the time, of the soldiers and commanders, and of the conditions in which they fought. He describes the key stages in the struggle - the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, the Przemysl siege, the Gorlice-Tarnow and Brusilov offensives and the Romanian and Turkish campaigns.

His book is a fascinating photographic record of the army under the Tsar Nicholas II, then under the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik rule that succeeded him. The impact of the Russian revolution is also revealed in the photographs which take the story through from the initial outbreaks of discontent and the abdication of the Tsar to Lenin’s take-over and the end of Russia’s war - and of the imperial army – in 1917.

Nik Cornish is a former head teacher whose passionate interest in the world wars on the Eastern Front and in Russias military history in particular has led to a series of important books on the subject including Images of Kursk, Stalingrad: Victory on the Volga, Berlin: Victory in Europe, Partisan Warfare on the Eastern Front 1941-1944, The Russian Revolution: World War to Civil War 1917-1921, Hitler versus Stalin: The Eastern Front 1941-1942 Barbarossa to Moscow, Hitler versus Stalin: The Eastern Front 1942-1943 Stalingrad to Kharkov and Hitler versus Stalin: The Eastern Front 1943-1944 Kursk to Bagration.