Rex A. Wade was an American historian who spent forty years teaching Russian and Soviet history at George Mason University in Virginia, wrote the standard English-language textbook on the Russian Revolution that has been used in universities worldwide across multiple editions, and was regarded at the time of his death as one of the foremost English-language authorities on the revolutionary events of 1917 and their immediate aftermath. He died on 16 August 2026 in the Falls Church area of Virginia at the age of 89.
He was born Rex Arvin Wade on 9 October 1936 in Piedmont, Kansas, in the agricultural heartland of the American Great Plains, a background that gave him a formation far from the Eastern European history to which his professional career was dedicated. He earned his doctorate at the University of Nebraska, developing the specialisation in Russian history that would define his entire career, and completed a dissertation that examined the Provisional Government’s handling of the war and peace question in the months between the February and October revolutions of 1917, a period of exceptional complexity and consequence in which a fragile democratic government attempted to manage the impossible combination of continuing a deeply unpopular war while simultaneously overseeing a fundamental social transformation.
He joined the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, in 1986 and remained there for forty years, teaching the history of Russia and the Soviet Union to generations of students. His first book, The Russian Search for Peace, 1917, published in 1969, examined those peace negotiations in rigorous detail, and his subsequent scholarship included Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution in 1984, which explored the role of armed workers’ organisations in the revolutionary process and contributed to a more complete understanding of the social forces involved in the Bolshevik seizure of power. His textbook, The Russian Revolution, 1917, published by Cambridge University Press and revised through multiple editions including a third edition in 2017, became the standard work used in university courses on the subject across the English-speaking world, praised for its clarity, its comprehensive command of the scholarship in both English and Russian, and its ability to make a complex and contested historical event accessible to students approaching it for the first time.
He also wrote The Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War in 2001, extending his chronological coverage beyond the revolutionary events of 1917 into the subsequent civil conflict that determined the ultimate political outcome of the revolution. His work provided students and general readers with the analytical tools to understand how a war-strained empire became a liberal republic in February 1917 and then a one-party communist state by late 1917 and early 1918, a sequence of events whose interpretation remains contested among historians and whose consequences shaped the history of the twentieth century more profoundly than almost any other sequence of events. He was 89 years old.