I came across something interesting in wikipedia recently, while commemorating a new statue for Gavrilo Princip (the assassin who kicked off the events that led to WW1) the President of Serbia said this: "Princip was a hero, a symbol of liberation ideas, tyrant-murderer, idea-holder of liberation from slavery, which spanned through Europe." To me, who lives in America where WW1 is generally remembered as kind of a catastrophe for humanity, this was kind of surprising.
Then I realized that the understanding of WW1 I have is primarily from the Western Front where there wasn't a lot of movement and the whole thing was kind of a grinding slog that didn't achieve much. In the Eastern Front however there was a lot of movement, fighting, and strategizing and the map changed a lot in the end giving rise to many new independent states. So my question is given how different Eastern Europe experienced WW1 does Eastern Europe have a much different understanding of the memory of WW1 than "the West"? If so how or in what way?
Edited for clarity
I'll give you some feedback here, though I don't think it fully answers your question. Further, I am not from Eastern Europe (although I have been accused of being Austrian or German by occasional Serb nationalists).
The memory of WW1 is less seen as a "titanic gridlock of great powers that changed almost nothing" in the Eastern Front region not so much because of the difference in warfare style (which at a tactical level was actually not that different from the west) but because the war was a national birthing event for many cultures. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia were all created as a result of the war, Romania greatly expanded and Italy less so.
The national creation event, and the historical events that followed have naturally caused much distortion and myth making. We can see distortions in all such stories. John Schindler specifically addresses this in the introduction of "Fall of the Double Eagle: The Battle for Galicia and the Demise of Austria-Hungary".
...Viennese wartime propaganda was countered by nationalist narratives bemoaning Austo-Hungarian oppression, and in the long run these narratives found a bigger audience thanks to the collapse of the Habsburg realm at the war's end.... It did not help serious historiography that the nationalist, anti-Habsburg regimes that governed in most of the former Dual Monarchy after 1918, notably Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Greater Romania, offered accounts similar to Hasek's (author of Good Soldier Svejk), minus the biting humor, depicting oppressed soldiery eager to desert to the Allies. To make matters worse, many accounts from the republic of Austria after 1918 echoed similar themes, names that brave German-Austrian soldiers had been left in the lurch by traitorous Slavs who had been disloyal from the start of the war.... Similar trends were in evidence in Horthyist Hungary, with the "heroic Magyar race" being substituted for brave Germans, naturally. The fall of nearly all the former Habsburg lands to Communism in 1945 hardly helped the writing of accurate history. Official accounts continued to emphasize the alleged oppression at the heart of Austria-Hungary, with yesterday's nationalist heroes resisting all things Habsburg being relabeled as proletarian vanguards. The essential willingness to resort to cliches at the expense of inconvenient facts remained the same."
So we have the immediate distortion caused by a surge in nationalistic fervor, concentrated by the incredible stresses that WW1 placed on the civilian front in Austria. Then before that can begin to be resolved, you get the German occupation, WW2, and the the Soviet occupation/influence for 45 years.
Mostly, recent works like Schindler, Alexander Watson, Christopher Clark, and Hew Strachan have dispelled the myths around both the ethnic oppression and the deserting soldiers. Schindler in particular wrote his entire thesis around the concept, showing that units of various ethnic groups fought bravely or poorly in correlation to the quality of their leaders and circumstances not their ethnic background. (John R Schindler, "A Hopeless Struggle", you can find it free in PDF form on the internet with a simple search). In the Austrian part of the Empire in particular, the government went out of its way to cater to the various ethnic groups. Freedom of language, freedom of religion, universal (male) suffrage. Regional governments had significant autonomy to govern their people as locally elected officials saw fit. It wasn't perfect. In areas of mix ethnic population one group often would dominate the other. The Poles did not always treat the Ukrainians well in shared regions, the Poles generally being educated and of higher socio-economic status and the Ukrainians (then known as Ruthenes) generally illiterate and poor agrarians. In the heavily mixed German-Czech Bohemian region, there was occasional strife between the two ethnic groups. It also wasn't perfect because in the Hungarian part of the Empire minorities had many fewer rights on language and religion, and a much more restricted vote. Even in Hungary, however, you were arguably better off as an ethnic minority than in many other countries in Europe at that time (for instance, Serbia). There also was no significant separatist movement in the Empire before the war. Voting results show that those types of political parties got very little support in favor of parties that advanced regional autonomy (of which they already had much). Part of this came down to practicality. None of the ethnic groups could have created a nation large enough or strong enough to defend itself from outside aggression. The Czechs knew that Russia, or maybe Germany, would simply replace Austria (as we later saw). The Ruthenes lacked industrial and economic might to ward off predators (as, again, we saw immediately). Italy might have been tempted by a Slovenia or Bosnia (they were already sorely tempted by Albania), and Serbia certainly would have made a grab for an independent Bosnia.
But let's not get confused about one thing. Princip was a fool,a puppet, and a murderer, recruited to do the work of hyper-nationalist Serb terrorist group who's membership so overlapped with the Serb government that it is difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. You can see why I might raise the ire of certain groups. A statue hailing Princip as a hero is an affront to decency and history and mere, but pure, propaganda.