Robert Service (historian)

British historian, academic, and author (born 1947)

This article is about the British historian. For the British-Canadian poet, see Robert W. Service.

Robert Service

FBA

Service speaking at the Tallinn Literature Festival HeadRead in May 2011

Born|

Robert John Service

(1947-10-29) 29 October 1947 (age 77)

United Kingdom

Awards| Duff Cooper Prize (2009)
Academic background
Alma mater| King's College, Cambridge
Academic work
Institutions| University of Oxford
Main interests| Russian history (1894–)
Notable works| Biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky

Robert John Service FBA (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.[1]

## Career and reception

[edit]

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.[2] 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".[3] 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.[4][3] Suhrkamp announced in February 2012 that it would publish a German translation of Robert Service's Trotsky in July 2012.[5] The book won the Duff Cooper Prize in the publication year 2009.[1]

## Works

[edit]

External videos

Presentation by Service on Stalin: A Biography, April 29, 2005, C-SPAN
Q&A interview with Service on Trotsky: A Biography, July 18, 2010, C-SPAN
Presentation by Service on The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991, July 29, 2015, C-SPAN

* The Bolshevik Party in Revolution 1917–23: A Study in Organizational Change (1979)
* Lenin: A Political Life (in three volumes: 1985, 1991 and 1995) [6]
* A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (1997)
* The Penguin History of Modern Russia From Tsarism to the 21st Century (1997)[7]
* 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. ISBN 0-330-41913-7 (2004)[8]
* Comrades: A World History of Communism (2007)
* Trotsky: A Biography (2009)[9][10][11]
* Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West (2011)[12]
* 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)

## References

[edit]

1. ^ a b "Professor Robert Service". St Antony's College. 13 January 2015. Retrieved 2 September 2018.
2. ^ McLemee, Scott. "The Re-Assassination of Leon Trotsky". Inside Higher Ed. 8 July 2011
3. ^ a b Weber, Wolfgang (23 November 2011). "European historians oppose publication by Suhrkamp of Robert Service's Trotsky biography".
4. ^ "Robert Service has written a diatribe, not a scientific polemic!" The World Socialist Web Site. Retrieved 28 November 2011
5. ^ "The Books Interview: Robert Service". www.newstatesman.com. 7 December 2011. Retrieved 2 September 2018.
6. ^ "Professor Robert Service". St Antony's College. St. Antony's College, University of Oxford. 13 January 2015.
7. ^ "The Penguin History of Modern Russia – Robert Service – Penguin Books". Penguin.co.uk. 24 September 2009. Archived from the original on 3 October 2012. Retrieved 31 August 2011.
8. ^ "Review of Robert Service's Stalin: A Biography–Part One". Wsws.org. 2 June 2005. Retrieved 31 August 2011.
9. ^ "John Gray on Trotsky by Robert Service". Literary Review. Archived from the original on 19 August 2011. Retrieved 31 August 2011.
10. ^ "Review: A 'dis-Service' to Leon Trotsky". socialistworld.net. Archived from the original on 5 March 2012. Retrieved 31 August 2011.
11. ^ A book that fails to meet the basic standards of historical scholarship The American Historical Review discredits Robert Service’s biography of Leon Trotsky
12. ^ "The Books Interview: Robert Service". www.newstatesman.com. 8 June 2021.

## External links

[edit]

Media related to Robert Service at Wikimedia Commons

* Robert Service's homepage
* Roberts, Russ (26 July 2010). "Robert Service on Trotsky". EconTalk. Library of Economics and Liberty.
* Appearances on C-SPAN
* Robert Service on The Guardian

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