Rating: 
Summary: Sweeping, but a little scattered...
Review: This is a classic book on the Russian war effort in 1914-1916. The title is misleading because the events of 1917 are not dealt with, and Stone implies they are of little importance. The maps are not that helpful. Despite his tremendous use of detail, the details are uneven, mentioning the names of army commanders at arbitrary points but not at others. Stone is at his best when he is revealing how the failings of Russian strategy, tactics, logistics, and weaponry were products of the faulty and skewed organization of Tsarist Russia, with many institutions being in effect autocephalous, not properly set up in the chain of command. This book is best seen as a rejoinder to the books on the Russian army that Stone despises as being too technocratic and concerned with weight of fire, and those that suggest the Russian army was too backward. Yet, because Stone does not go into any depth to cover the weapons introduced during the war, the Russian Imperial Air Service, how the Russians read the German naval codes, the Russian experiments with armored vehicles (including a giant tricycle and the halftracks), the magnificent Sikorsky four-engine bomber, how the Russians informed their Western allies how to use hexamine to improve their gas masks, their use of massive bon fires to raise up German gas clouds in August 1915 at the fortress of Osowiec (which the Germans then used at Loos in September 1915, and the Russian trench obstacle of "Spanish Riders" and multiple trenches used at their defeat at Gorlice-Tarnow in May 1915, Stone in some respects undermines his own efforts. He wanted to show how the Russian war effort was more interesting and more advanced than many historians gave it credit, but he does not always succeed. He goes into wonderful detail about how the Russians had a great artillery fuze and had delays in producing it, but goes into no detail at all about Russian weapons in general, apart from his repeated demonstrations that the artillery and the infantry were not organized to work together. He criticizes General Golovin's account of Russia not having enough artillery shells, and for having insufficient munitions in general, but he fails to mention how Golovin advanced the teaching of staff officers, and that Golovin's book on the Russian army was incredibly insightful as well on the matters Stone is most interested in, namely organization, institutional accountability, logistics, and the war effort of the home front. By ignoring Russia's genuine achievements, Stone in effect strengthens the thesis of those he is trying to refute.
I have to say this is a wonderful book. It is required reading for anyone interested in the Russian army of 1914-1916, but it gives insufficient information about the Eastern Front of 1914-1918. One of several lasting contributions Stone makes is to show how the Tsarist army of the war was divided in many factions, with many of the officers later serving in the Red Army.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for its time, but now out of date
Review: When this book came out, it was indeed a refreshing view of the "Unknown War," as Winston Churchill termed it.Stone's insight into the politics of the Russian armed forces and government, as well as some of the myths regarding ammunition shortages, went far to fill in a number of gaps in Great War historiography. However, many of Stone's arguments have not stood up to the test of time; i.e, trying to paint Sukhomlinov as a reformer, when he was in fact an opportunist, and the dualistic depiction of the factionalism within the Russian officer corps is also overly simplistic. Stone unfortunately gives short shrift to the development of military air power (something the Russians were far advanced in), and some his characterization of a number of Russian commanders as fools and idiots is simply unfair. With the wealth of newer material now available from Russian archival sources (that in fairness were not available to Prof. Stone in the early '70s), it's time a newer version of this still understudied front be undertaken.
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