Robert Service (historian)

Template:Short description Template:About Template:EngvarB Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox scholar Robert John Service Template:Post-nominals (born 29 October 1947) is a British post-revisionist historian, academic, and author who has written extensively on the history of the Soviet Union, particularly the period from the October Revolution in 1917 to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. He was until 2013 a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford, a fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He has written biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. Service has been a fellow of the British Academy since 1998.<ref name="St Antony's" />

Career and reception

Service spent his undergraduate years at King's College, Cambridge, where he studied Russian and classical Greek. He went to the universities of Essex and of Leningrad for his postgraduate work, and taught at Keele and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, before joining the University of Oxford in 1998.

Between 1986 and 1995, Service published a three-volume biography of Vladimir Lenin. He wrote several works of general history on 20th-century Russia, including A History of Twentieth-Century Russia. He published a trilogy of biographies on the three most important Bolshevik leaders: Lenin (2000), Stalin (2004), and Trotsky (2009).

His biography of Trotsky was strongly criticised by Service's Hoover Institution colleague Bertrand Mark Patenaude in a review for the American Historical Review.<ref name="mclemee">McLemee, Scott. "The Re-Assassination of Leon Trotsky". Inside Higher Ed. 8 July 2011</ref> Patenaude, reviewing Service's book alongside a rebuttal by the Trotskyist David North (In Defence of Leon Trotsky), charged Service with making dozens of factual errors, misrepresenting evidence, and "fail[ing] to examine in a serious way Trotsky's political ideas".<ref name="auto">Template:Cite web</ref> Service responded that the book's factual errors were minor and that Patenaude's own book on Trotsky presented Trotsky as a "noble martyr". The book was criticised by Hermann Weber, a German historian of communism who led a campaign to prevent Suhrkamp Verlag from publishing it in Germany. Fourteen historians and sociologists signed a letter to the publishing house. The letter cited "a host of factual errors", the "repugnant connotations" of the passages in which Service deals with Trotsky's Jewish origins, implicitly accusing him of antisemitism, and Service's recourse to "formulas associated with Stalinist propaganda" for the purpose of discrediting Trotsky.<ref>"Robert Service has written a diatribe, not a scientific polemic!" The World Socialist Web Site. Retrieved 28 November 2011</ref><ref name="auto"/> Suhrkamp announced in February 2012 that it would publish a German translation of Robert Service's Trotsky in July 2012.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The book won the Duff Cooper Prize in the publication year 2009.<ref name="St Antony's">Template:Cite web</ref>

Works

• The Bolshevik Party in Revolution 1917–23: A Study in Organizational Change (1979)
• Lenin: A Political Life (in three volumes: 1985, 1991 and 1995) <ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (1997)
• The Penguin History of Modern Russia From Tsarism to the 21st Century (1997)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• A History of Modern Russia, from Nicholas II to Putin (1998, Second edition in 2003)
• The Russian Revolution, 1900–27 (Studies in European History) (1999)
• Lenin: A Biography (2000)
• Russia: Experiment with a People (2002)
• Stalin: A Biography (2004), Oxford, 715 pages ill. Template:ISBN (2004)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Comrades: A World History of Communism (2007)
• Trotsky: A Biography (2009)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>A book that fails to meet the basic standards of historical scholarship

The American Historical Review discredits Robert Service’s biography of Leon Trotsky</ref>

• Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West (2011)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• The End of the Cold War: 1985–1991 (2015)
• The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution (2017)
• Russia and Its Islamic World (2017)
• Kremlin Winter: Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin (2019)
• Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924 (2023)

External links

• Robert Service's homepage
• Template:Cite web
• Template:C-SPAN
• Robert Service on The Guardian