World War I: Eastern Front

Abstract World War I was fought on many fronts, none more enormous than the Eastern Front. The geographic scale alone was mammoth, and the casualties inflicted and losses in equipment were equally immense. In its conduct, the war on the Eastern Front was quite different from the Western Front; while operations on the Western Front assumed a stationary character between the mobile campaigns of 1914 and the return of mobility in 1918, the Eastern Front was different. In the East, the war remained mobile throughout, with large swaths of territory (and the people inhabiting them) changing hands on a regular basis. Finally, in a political sense, the war on the Eastern Front was far more destructive than the Western Front. Of the three political regimes that went to war on the Eastern Front in 1914, none remained by the end of 1918.