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The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917, by David R. Stone. Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2015. 368 pages. $34.95 (Kindle $19.99).
With the centennial of World War I, interested readers can choose from among a surging wave of new books about the World War I experience and its impact on modern history. Most of these have focused on the western front, but a small number reexamine the war in Eastern Europe. Among these, David Stone's The Russian Army in the Great War is the first new historical overview of the Russian military on the eastern front since Norman Stone's The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 was published forty years ago. With the fall of the Soviet Union, historians have enjoyed more access to Russian archives and accounts of the war. While this new research is already familiar to specialists, Stone sets out to make it accessible to the general reader. He is clear from the outset that his work is a military history, so while social and economic factors frame military operations, they are not the focus of the volume.
Most general histories of World War I describe the Russian army in a narrative of failure. The "Russian steamroller" feared by its adversaries for its huge but...