David R. Stone serves as the William E. Odom Professor of Russian Studies at the US Naval War College. He received his B.A. in History and Mathematics from Wabash College and his Ph.D. in History from Yale University. He taught at Hamilton College and at Kansas State University, where he served as director of the Institute for Military History. He was also a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
His first book, Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union, 1926-1933, won the Shulman Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the Best First Book Prize of the Historical Society. He has also published A Military History of Russia: From Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya, and The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917. He edited The Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945; The Russian Civil War: Campaigns and Operations; and The Russian Civil War: Military and Society. He is the author of several dozen articles and book chapters on Russian and Soviet military history and foreign policy. Professor Stone also has two lecture series with "The Great Courses on Battlefield Europe: The Second World War" and "War in the Modern World." He is currently completing a strategic history of the Russo-Japanese War and working on another project on Leon Trotsky and the creation of the Soviet military.