Department of History

Stone Spends Month in Madison, WI on Russian Revolution Project

the Soviet Union at WarDavid Stone, Pickett Professor of Military History, spent July at the University of Wisconsin, Madison as part of an international team assembling a major project to commemorate the centenary of Russia’s experience in World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War. “For the Russian Empire, the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 began seven years of social and political upheaval,” Stone said. “The goal of this project is to gather and assess the state of our knowledge on those momentous events.”

The editorial team of the “Russia’s Great War and Revolution” project includes thirty scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Russia, and Japan, coordinating the efforts of hundreds of historians. The final product will be at least dozen published volumes covering all aspects of Russian history during World War I and the Russian Revolution. Publication will begin in 2014 for the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War and continue for the next several years.

Stone’s responsibility is editing the volume covering the military history of the Russian Civil War, the conflict for control of Russia between the Reds (Vladimir’s Lenin’s communist Bolshevik party) and the Whites (a broad coalition of anti-communist forces). “Though much less is known about it,” says Stone, “the Civil War lasted as long as World War I and killed far more Russians. It had an enormous effect on the subsequent development of the Soviet Union. Our goal in this volume is to pull together a range of research on the Civil War and how it was fought.”

Stone remarked that one of the best parts of the experience in Madison was the cooperation and camaraderie. “All the people involved, from the most junior to the most senior professors, were truly committed to putting together the best project possible. You don’t get a lot of credit in the scholarly profession for editorial work, but people put in long hours for the sake of bringing this research to a broader public.”