The Eastern and Western
fronts, even though they were fronts of the same
war, were very different in character. And a lot of it came out of
the fact of who was fighting it and especially how big
the actual fronts were. So the Western Front,
which was generally this region right over here,
was a much smaller front than the Eastern Front. The Eastern Front
was essentially this entire region
right over there. And because of
that, trench warfare did not become as major of a
factor on the Eastern Front. In fact, was fairly useless
on the Eastern Front. If you imagine trying to
dig a bunch of trenches. So if you're trying to
dig a bunch of trenches, trenches are huge advantage
for the defending army as long as you can block off
the entire region with trenches. So over here, you can't
go around the trenches, you essentially, if you
want to make some ground, an attacking army has
to cross the trenches. And because you have
now machine guns and the defending
soldiers could essentially sit behind the trenches,
they could essentially mow down the attacking
army very easily. And that's what caused the
Western Front, especially after the Schlieffen
Plan was not able to be executed on
as quickly as possible, it turned into just a stalemate. So you just had a stalemate,
a hugely defensive stalemate. Because both parties had
their trenches, it was very, it was hugely advantageous
for the defending side. On the Eastern Front,
you had this huge front. It was very hard. You couldn't have. They didn't have enough
people to dig trenches across this entire front. And so you could imagine if
you tried to dig a trench, but you weren't able to
cover the entire front, then the attacking army doesn't
have to storm your trench. They don't have to
do that anymore. They could just go
around your trench. And because trench warfare
was not as significant of a factor on the, or wasn't
as anywhere near as much of a factor on
the Eastern Front, it was a much more fluid front. You had offensives
and counter-offensives between the Germans,
Austrians on one side and the Russians on the other. Now the other factor-- and
this was mainly with Russia as a variable-- the
other factor was just what was going on in Russia. So Russia had several
things going for it. The main thing is,
it had a huge army. It had a huge standing
army, even before the war. And it was able to
amass even more. So it had a huge army. But what was going
against it-- and this is why it eventually had to get
into a very unfavorable treaty with the Central Powers
near the end of the war-- is it had huge
internal problems. And I'm not just talking
about the military. I was talking about, I'm
talking about the entire empire. And it arguably was due to
the war, due to the economic and the human cost of the war. But as we enter
into 1917, you first have the February Revolution. Tsar Nicholas II has to
abdicate the throne because of the riots that
are going on, because of the unhappiness,
the unease with people literally going hungry. People, obviously, the morale
of the troops going down. And then on top of that,
the Russian military, even though it had a huge army
in the beginning of the war, the Russian industry wasn't
ready to fully supply that army in as good of a way
as, say, the German army was. And on top of that, it had
communication problems. And even in the beginning
phases of the Eastern Front, it even had issues in terms of
coordinating its actual armies. And so what we'll
see, and we'll cover this in much more depth
in a future video, but what we'll see
is, Western Front. Schlieffen Plan not executed
as fast as possible. Ends up in a stalemate. This did allow the Germans
to bring some of their troops back to the Eastern Front
to fight the Russians. This goes back and
forth as we'll see. But once you enter
into 1917, you have a revolution in Russia. First, you have the
February Revolution. Tsar Nicholas II
has to abdicate. And then later that year,
you have the Bolsheviks overthrow the
interim government. And you now have
Communist Russia. The Bolsheviks were
in no mood to continue to fight the Germans. The military was in
no mood to continue to fight the Germans and
the and Austria-Hungary. And so they, essentially,
get into a treaty with them and kind of take
themselves out of the war. So we'll cover that in
a little bit more detail in a future video.