Robert Service (historian)

For other people named Robert Service, see Robert Service (disambiguation).

Robert John Service

Service speaking at the Tallinn Literature Festival HeadRead in May 2011
Full name	Robert John Service
Born	29 October 1947 (1947-10-29) United Kingdom
Main interests	Russian history (1917-53)
Major works	Biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky

Robert John Service (born 29 October 1947) is a British historian, academic, and author who has written extensively on the history of Soviet Russia, particularly the era from the October Revolution to Stalin's death. He is currently 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. As an author Service is known for his 2000, 2004, and 2009 biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky, respectively.

Career

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

Writings and Criticism

Between 1986 and 1995, Service published a three-volume biography of Lenin. He has also written several works of general history on 20th-century Russia such as A History of Twentieth-Century Russia. Robert Service has written a trilogy of biographies: Lenin (2000), Stalin (2004) and Trotsky (2009).

His biography of Trotsky was positively reviewed in the British and American press on its publication, but two years later was strongly criticized by Service's Hoover Institution colleague Bertrand Patenaude in a review for the American Historical Review. Patenaude, reviewing Service's book alongside a rebuttal by the Trotskyist David North (In Defense 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." Service responded that the book's factual errors were minor and that Patenaude's own book on Trotsky presented him as a "noble martyr". The book has also been harshly criticized by the German historian of communism Hermann Weber, who led a campaign to prevent Suhrkamp Verlag from publishing it in Germany. Fourteen prominent historians 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, and Service’s recourse to 'formulas associated with Stalinist propaganda' for the purpose of discrediting Trotsky.

Conflict with Orlando Figes

In 2010, books by Robert Service were criticized in several reviews posted by another British historian, Orlando Figes, on the UK site of the online bookseller Amazon. Figes later issued an apology to Service who threatened to sue him for libel

Works

• The Bolshevik Party in Revolution 1917-23: A Study in Organizational Change (1979)
• A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (1997)
• The Russian Revolution, 1900-27 (Studies in European History) (1999)
• A History of Modern Russia, from Nicholas II to Putin (1998, Second edition in 2003)
• Lenin: A Biography (2000)
• Russia: Experiment with a People (2002)
• Stalin: A Biography (2004)
• Comrades: A World History of Communism (2007)
• Trotsky: A Biography (2009)
• The Penguin History of Modern Russia From Tsarism to the 21st Century (1997)

External links

• Robert Service's homepage
• Interview on C-SPAN
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/30/paperback-of-the-week-robert-service-trotsky
• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/6271804/Trotsky-by-Robert-Service-review.html
• Hoover Institute