The twentieth century visited the worst of its horrors on East-Central Europe. In these lands—stretching from today’s Poland through Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic into western Russia—wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocide ravaged the population. Most notorious is the Soviet and Nazi barbarism of the 1930s and 1940s, when totalitarian regimes murdered some 14 million people. Often forgotten, however, is the fact that the extraordinary violence in these lands began decades earlier, already with the outbreak of the First World War. From 1914, huge armies ranged widely in East-Central Europe. With vicious fighting, ambitious plans of conquest, and the persecution of whole ethnic groups, this first war unleashed the new era of barbarity.
The First World War’s Eastern Front was the arena for an immense imperial clash. In the west, initially on the defensive, stood imperial Germany and the Habsburg Empire. To the east was Tsarist Russia, whose army of 3.5 million soldiers was the largest in the world. Russian ambitions for conquest in 1914 were fixed on the Habsburg province of Galicia—today in southern Poland and western Ukraine—at the southern end of the front. In Russian leaders’ imaginations, the eastern half of this province was ‘primordial Russian land,’ even though it was populated by Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. The ferocity of the violence the authoritarian Tsarist regime launched to conquer the province, and the frighteningly modern population engineering enacted there to turn it into ‘Russian’ land, converged with greatest intensity at one place: the fortress-city of Przemyśl.
