Aleksei Ermolaevich Evert was born on March 4, 1857, in Moscow, to a family of nobility with Orthodox German ancestry.

Aleksei graduated from the 1st Moscow Catherine II Cadet Corps in 1874 and the Alexandrovskoye Military School in 1876.

He later became commander of several minor Regiments before he was appointed staff officer of the Warsaw Military District again, this time for special assignments under the commander-in-chief Count Gurko.

In 1911, Evert was promoted to General of the Infantry, and in mid 1912, he was appointed the commander-in-chief of the Irkutsk Military District and ataman of the Transbaikal Cossack host.

In mid August 1915, Evert later replaced army chief of staff General Mikhail Alekseyev as the commander-in-chief of the Western Front, he was also made adjutant-general later in December of that year.

The French Slavic professor Jules Legras [fr], who arrived in the Russia in February 1916 on the instructions of the Military Propaganda Department at the second department of the General Staff of the French Ministry of Defense, in his memoirs, he negatively assessed the actions of Evert:[3] Constant orders and counter-orders on the eve of the attack; continuous fluctuations about the grouping of military units, intervention in the course of the operation, for example, two days before the change, the unit that knew the site changed to another that had never seen it.

Having studied these documents, I felt great sorrow: General Evert's lack of talent manifested itself here in these pompous and empty phrases; his indecision, underlined by countless counter-orders; his misunderstanding of reality, dispersed in instructions, when every person who knew the trenches and material means that the Germans had at their disposal was aware of the impossibility of this operationAccording to the directive of the Russian Supreme Command Headquarters in late April 1916, an offensive on the middle of the Western Front was entrusted to Evert.

General Aleksei Brusilov, commander-in-chief of the Southwestern Front and the planner of the Brusilov Offensive (which was named after him), gave the following assessment to General Evert:[4] The attack on Baranovichi took place, but, as it was not difficult to foresee, the troops suffered huge losses with total failure, and this ended the fighting activities of the Western Front to facilitate my offensive.

Learning their answers, he sent the tsar a telegram, in which referred to the fact that the army "in its present composition ... can not be counted," wrote that "finding no other outcome, unlimitedly devoted to your Majesty, the loyal subject begs Your Majesty, in the name of the salvation of the Motherland and the Dynasty, to make a decision ... as the only one apparently capable of ending the revolution and saving Russia from the horrors of anarchy. "

According to the memoirs of General Ali-Agha Shikhlinsky, after the February Revolution, one of the members of the Duma, Nikolai Shchepkin, who was ordered by the new minister of war of the newly formed Russian Republic, Alexander Guchkov, to go to Minsk.

General Evert married Nadezhda Poznanskaya and with whom had seven children: Ignatius, Boris, Vladimir, Sophia, Valentina, Vera, Vsevolod.