Rex A. Wade

Rex Arvin Wade was born on 9 October 1936 in Piedmont, Kansas. He graduated from Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas, and then went on to graduate study, earning his PhD at the University of Nebraska.

In a profile for the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies he recalled that in the autumn of 1958, in his first semester of graduate school, he took a seminar on the Russian Revolution and was hooked. The revolution became the focus of his master's thesis and then of his doctoral dissertation, at the height of the Cold War, when there was very little quality scholarship on it in English.

Wade taught at Wisconsin State University, La Crosse, from 1963 to 1968 and at the University of Hawaii from 1968 to 1986. When the university's College of Arts and Sciences was reorganised in the early 1980s, the history department joined the College of Arts and Humanities and provided Wade as its first dean. In 1972 he held a Fulbright research grant at the University of Helsinki, and he was a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina, the University of Nebraska and Portland State University.

In 1986 he joined the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he also served as a dean, and he retired in 2006, continuing as an emeritus professor.

His first book, The Russian Search for Peace, February to October 1917 (1969), was followed by Red Guards and Workers' Militias in the Russian Revolution (1984), The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge University Press, 2000, with a third edition in 2017) and The Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War (2001). He edited Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches to the Russian Revolution of 1917 (2004) and Documents of Soviet History (three volumes, 1991 to 1994), and co-edited Politics and Society in Provincial Russia: Saratov, 1590 to 1917 (1989). In retirement he edited a new edition of the sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross's 1918 account of travelling across revolutionary Russia and planned a book called The Long Revolution: Russia 1880 to 1930.

He attended the earliest annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, now ASEEES, and kept attending throughout his years in Hawaii. He chaired its programme committee three times and was active in regional associations, especially the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies.

Wade married Beryl, and they were married for 68 years. They had three children, Beth, Douglas and Stephanie, and in later life five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. His family described him as capable, supportive, wise and caring. He was an avid tennis player and enjoyed art and pottery, travel and time with his family.

Rex A. Wade died on 16 August 2026 in Annandale, Virginia, at the age of 89. No cause of death was made public.

He was survived by his wife, Beryl, his brothers Larry and Garry, his children Beth, Douglas and Stephanie, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Arrangements were handled by Fairfax Memorial Funeral Home, services were private, and the family suggested donations in his memory to the Builder Fund at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas.

Wade belonged to the wave of scholars whose work from the late 1960s onward reshaped understanding of the Russian Revolution in English. His study of the Red Guards and workers' militias and his single volume history The Russian Revolution, 1917, which went through three editions, became standard reading in university courses, and his document collections gave students direct access to Soviet sources. His family remembered him for his scholarship and leadership and for the many students who learned from him.