18 th of August 1914 Tannenberg was in Poland First battle of Russia Russian casualties 130,000 Russian POW over 100,000

R ussian generals began immediate offensives in Eastern Prussia They experienced some early success when The Four armies broke through the Austrians and defeated one- third of Austria – Hungary army by capturing many prisoners and artillery But the second battle of Masurian on second September where on whole army unit surrounded and forced to surrender In the first 12 months war, the Russian army lost 4 million soldiers and 16 million civilians in region captured by enemy

Russia was in no position to fight a large scale war This was due to lack of rifles and ammunition The minister of war General Sukhomlinov favored using bayonets in traditional warfare He encouraged the generals to storm enemy trenches engaging in hand to hand combat This was a failure because the Germans equipped with barbed wire and modern machine guns

Witte had developed a railway system by the 1890 However the trains was so poorly organized that the troops often went hungry There were adequate meat and grain supplies in the Ukraine and Siberia but were not delivered on time This was compounded by skilled men being sent to fight the war, leaving locomotive without driver, mechanics and farmers

By 1916 Russia has witnessed four and a half times more men captured than killed 1916 Killed: 270, POW 1.2 million The British had contrasting figures 5 times more dead than captured By 1917 Russian POW’s dramatically outnumbered the dead 16 to Killed 58, POW over 900,000 The high POW number was due to the Russians preference of being captured

By December 1916 Bolshivek ideas were spreading rapidly Desertion in times of war had been traditionally viewed as selfish and cowardly However as Bolshivek ideas became more widely accepted surrendering to the enemy became more common A popular tactic was prompting entire companies to wound themselves in the finger or cheek and then race to a hospital train to return home honorably wounded in battle