Ebook: The End of the Russian Imperial Army

Allan Wildman presents the first detailed study of the Army's collapse under the strains of war and of the front soldiers' efforts to participate in the Revolution. Originally published in 1980.

Allan K. Wildman, professor of history at Ohio State University, died of cancer in Columbus on 31 October 1996, at the height of a distinguished career as a scholar, educator, and editor. Allan Kenyon Wildman was born on 16 November 1927, in Wooster, Ohio, where his father was a physician at Wooster College. Allan was the youngest of three brothers. In 1945 he entered the U.S. Navy's officer training program, but at the end of the war he was reassigned to boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. Before his discharge in 1946 he served on a Liberty ship bringing military personnel home from the South Pacific. After his discharge, Wildman followed his brother Arthur to the University of Dubuque, where he studied for two years before transferring to the University of Michigan, from which he received his B.A. degree in 1950. Pursuing the interest in religion that was shared by all three Wildman brothers, he then moved to the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where he received the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1953.

It was during his Divinity School years that Wildman was first attracted to the study of Russia. By his own testimony, the prime influence was a two-term course in Russian ethical theory taught in 1952-53 by Professor George L. Kline, then a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, on leave from Columbia University. Wildman's B.D. thesis, for which Kline served as reader, reflected the linkages in his intellectual development between religion, philosophy, and Russian history, and it foreshadowed his later work on the revolutionary period: its title was "Berdyaev's Interpretation of the Meaning of the Russian Revolution in Terms of His Philosophy of History."