Roger R. Reese, The Imperial Russian Army in Peace, War, and Revolution, 1856-1917

Despite the title, this book is neither an institutional nor a combat history of the Imperial Russian Army over the last six decades of its existence. Rather, it is a social history of the army’s officer corps, and, to a lesser extent, of the army’s soldiery, with an emphasis on relations between the two. The author, Roger Reese, an acknowledged specialist on the Red Army, disputes conventional wisdom over the impact of the Great War and the February Revolution of 1917 in undermining the auth...