Russia's Iron General: The Life of Aleksei A. Brusilov, 1853–1926 by Jamie H. Cockfield (review)

Abstract

SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 378 Cockfield, Jamie H. Russia’s Iron General: The Life of Aleksei A. Brusilov, 1853–1926. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New York and London, 2019. xi + 375 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $120.00: £80.00. Russia’s ‘iron general’, Aleksei Alekseevich Brusilov, is known abroad mainly for his unprecedentedly successful 1916 offensive which effectively knocked Austria-Hungary out of the First World War. This is probably the best book on Brusilov’s life, operations, military career and command style that we shall ever see. JamieCockfieldhasinterlacedofficialrecords,biographies,foreignobservers’ reports, media reports, memoirs and Brusilov’s personal correspondence to create a masterly, authoritative, but very readable account of Brusilov’s life and career. He recounts it from Brusilov’s birth and upbringing in the Caucasus through nearly sixty years of military service to Russia, whether under the tsar, the 1917 Provisional Kerenskii Government, or the new Bolshevik one. Those familiar with modern Russia will also sense lessons for today. Nearly a hundred years after Brusilov’s death, and thirty after the end of the Communist regime, whose end Brusilov predicted, Jamie Cockfield’s book is supremely timely. Its wider importance as a work of history is summarized in his moving dedication, ‘To the Russian soldiers of both World Wars, whose enormous sacrifices saved the West’. That is no exaggeration. Russia’s contribution to the coalition effort in the Great War has often been minimized or ignored, as summarized in the subtitle of the eastern front volume (1931) of one of the editions of Churchill’s The World Crisis, ‘The Unknown War’. The November 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Civil War split the former imperial army between the Whites, many of whom later emigrated, and the Reds, whose army some 50,000 former imperial officers joined. Brusilov avoided participation during the Civil War, partly, Jamie Cockfield reveals, because of frailty (in 1917 he was 64) and of a bad injury sustained when a shell fired during the November 1917 Revolution hit his Moscow apartment. Before then, and during a lengthy convalescence, his sympathies seem to have moved towards the new regime because it seemed the best guarantee of Russian security and national identity. Then, when the re-created state of Poland attacked Soviet Russia in 1920, Brusilov, who had kept aloof from politics, rallied to his country. He was initially posted to the Ministry of Agriculture, to increase the supply of horses for the Red Army, and finished as Red Army Inspector of Cavalry — his parent arm — and was helped by the leading Soviet military guru and theorist, Mikhail Vasilevich Frunze. Soviet historians were, for obvious reasons, reluctant to praise the achievements of the Imperial Russian Army. The émigrés who fled to REVIEWS 379 Czechoslovakia, France and elsewhere regarded Brusilov, who had stayed in and with ‘mother Russia’, as a traitor. Jamie Cockfield explains these dilemmas and contradictions and the soul-searching that Brusilov underwent very well. The Second World War, in turn, quickly became the Cold War and Soviet Russia’s overwhelming role in defeating Germany and then Japan in that conflict has tended to be sidelined. The account of Brusilov’s personal and professional lives is skilfully woven. He married twice. His first wife, Anna, died in 1908 but he married again quickly, this time to a much younger woman, Nadezhda — Nadia — who was, clearly, the great love of his life. He wrote to her frequently, even when under the greatest pressure during the First World War, and the letters reveal a kind and generous but somewhat extravagant woman, a socialite who revelled in her husband’s position and rank and enjoyed entertaining. She clearly loved her husband and during the war constantly sent him cigarettes, fruit and sweets. Against all Brusilov’s obviously spartan instincts, this was the only luxury he permitted himself. Brusilov’s reputation as the ‘iron general’ had been forged in his time as an instructor and later commander of the Officers’ Cavalry School in St Petersburg from 1881 to 1908. He completely remodelled cavalry officer training and wrote articles on employing cavalry in modern war. He led by example to the consummate degree, demanded maximum effort from...