Robert Service (historian)

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

Robert Service
Service speaking at the Tallinn Literature Festival HeadRead in May 2011
Born	Robert John Service (1947-10-29) 29 October 1947 United Kingdom
Academic work
Main interests	Russian history (1917–53)
Notable 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 the Soviet Union, particularly the era from the October Revolution to Stalin's death. 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.

Service is known for his biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky.

Career and Criticism

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, before joining Oxford University in 1998, where he currently teaches.

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. Comprise his trilogy of Bolshevik and Menshevik leaders biographies are 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. 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". 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 was criticised by the German historian of communism Hermann Weber, 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, and Service's recourse to 'formulas associated with Stalinist propaganda' for the purpose of discrediting Trotsky. Suhrkamp announced in February 2012 that it would go ahead and publish a German translation of Robert Service's Trotsky in July 2012.

Publications

• The Bolshevik Party in Revolution 1917-23: A Study in Organizational Change (1979)
• A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (1997)
• The Penguin History of Modern Russia From Tsarism to the 21st Century (1997)
• 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 O-330-41913-7(2004)
• Comrades: A World History of Communism (2007)
• Trotsky: A Biography (2009)
• Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West (2011)
• The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 (2015)

External links

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