Robert Service (historian)

For other similarly named persons, see Robert Service

Professor Robert John Service (born 29 October 1947) is a British historian of Russia. He is a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford.

Service spent his undergraduate years at 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, University College London, before joining Oxford University in 1998, where he is currently Professor of Russian History.

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. He has recently completed a trilogy of biographies: Lenin (2000), Stalin (2004) and Trotsky (2009).

Service's anti-communist stance has been criticised by left-wing historians and commentators such as Tariq Ali, Seumas Milne and David North. [1] [2] [3] Service was invited to attend the Socialist Party's Socialism 2009 festival in London for a debate on Trotsky, but refused. [4]

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)

External links

• Robert Service's homepage
• In The Service of Historical Falsification: A Review of Robert Service's Trotsky: A Biography
• Historians in the Service of the “Big Lie”: An Examination of Professor Robert Service’s Biography of Trotsky
• Review of Robert Service’s Stalin: A Biography
• Review of Robert Service's Trotsky: A Biography
• Hoover Institute
• Interview with Robert Service on Totalitarian Russia, in The Browser, January 2010