Aleksei Alekseyevich Brusilov

Алексей Алексеевич Брусилов

1853–1926 ○ Died, congestive heart failure

Designer of the 1916 Brusilov Offensive and the last great tsarist commander, who later joined the Red Army

'The 12th Cavalry Division must die. Not all at once, but by evening' — Brusilov's order to General Kaledin, 29 August 1914

Designer and commander of the 1916 Brusilov Offensive, widely regarded as the Russian army's greatest victory of the First World War. He devised breakthrough tactics based on simultaneous strikes along the entire front that shattered the Austro-Hungarian army and were later studied as a textbook case in Soviet military science. During the 1917 revolution he served briefly as supreme commander-in-chief but could not halt the army's disintegration; after the civil war he joined the Bolsheviks' Red Army and served as inspector of cavalry. His decision, a tsarist general cooperating with the Soviet regime, was condemned as betrayal by the White emigration and treated as pragmatic patriotism by the Soviet side.