• 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: 270,000
• 1916 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
1
• 1917 Killed 58,000
• 1917 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