Readers wanting to learn more about the Great War on the Eastern Front can do no better than
David R. Stone's new work,
The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (University Press of Kansas, 2015). The last work to treat this comprehensively was Norman Stone's (no relation),
The Eastern Front, 1914-1917, published in 1975. While literature in English has been sparse, the Russian-language literature on the Eastern Front has grown tremendously in recent decades, and so an update was desperately needed. David Stone does more than updated the earlier Stone's work, though. He deftly shifts our perspective not only on the Eastern Front but on the war as a whole by emphasizing commonalities (among empires, operations, home fronts) while appropriately highlighting the many unique challenges faced by the tsarist state. We learn not only about the iconic clashes in East Prussia or the Brusilov Offensive, but see the critical importance of campaigns in Poland, the Caucasus, and Romania to the Russian defeat.