Background

Robert Service was born on October 29, 1947, in the United Kingdom.

Education

Robert Service studied at King's College. His Cambridge undergraduate degree was in Russian and ancient Greek. He switched to politics at Essex for master's studies before opting for research in Soviet history.

Career

Educated at Cambridge and Essex Universities, Robert Service held a professorship at Oxford until 2013. He has been a British Academy fellow since 1998. He writes for the newspapers and broadcasts in both the United Kingdom and the United States. He served as an expert witness in the Berezovsky-Abramovich trial and at the Litvinenko inquiry in London.

Robert Service worked at the University of Essex and Saint Petersburg State University. He taught at Keele University and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Also, he is a Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Robert Service is a prolific writer, penning eight books on modern Russian history, including biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin. He wrote a marvelous book on communism titled "Comrades. Communism: A World History."

His books and articles, dealing mainly with Russian history from the late nineteenth century to the present day, cover economic, social and cultural as well as political aspects. He accompanies this with work on contemporary Russia.

Since the early 1990s, Service has been one of few Western historians to gain access to previously-closed Soviet archives. As a result, he has uncovered a good deal of hitherto unknown information about the Bolshevik party, its leaders and the events of 1917-1924.

To cite one example of this, Service was the first Western historian to examine Lenin's hand-written 1918 "hanging order," which commanded the public execution of 100 kulaks in Penza, chiefly as a deterrent to others.

Currently, he is researching Russia in the Putin period since 2012.

Achievements

• Robert Service is widely known for his books "Lenin: A Biography," "Stalin: A Biography," and "Trotsky: A Biography." The last one brought to Robert the Duff Cooper Prize in 2009. Also, he wrote a book on communism "Comrades. Communism: A World History" which became International Bestseller.

Works

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• book

  • The End of the Cold War 1985-1991

    (Drawing on new archival research, Robert Service's grippi...)

    2015
  • The Penguin History of Modern Russia

    (In his acclaimed history Robert Service provides a superb...)

    1997
  • A History of Modern Russia: From Nicholas II to Putin

    (A comprehensive overview of twentieth-century Russian his...)

    2003
  • Stalin: A Biography

    (Drawing on the wealth of unexplored material available fo...)

    2004
  • The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organisational Change 1917-1923

    (In The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organiza...)

    1979
  • The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russia Revolution

    (Drawing on the Tsar's diaries and other hitherto unexamin...)

    2017
  • A History of Twentieth-Century Russia

    (A History of Twentieth-Century Russia is the first work t...)

    1997
  • Comrades!: A History of World Communism

    (Almost two decades after the collapse of communism in Eas...)

    2007
  • The Russian Revolution, 1900-1927

    (Robert Service has revised and updated his popular book o...)

    1999
  • Russia: Experiment with a People

    (In this engrossing account, Robert Service traces the for...)

    2002
  • Russia and Its Islamic World

    (Russia has long played an influential part in its world o...)

    2017
  • Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West

    (In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, the Western...)

    2011
  • Kremlin Winter: Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin

    (Russia has been locked into a winter of authoritarian rul...)

    2019
  • Trotsky: A Biography

    (Trotsky is perhaps the most intriguing and, given his pro...)

    2009
  • Lenin: A Biography

    (Lenin is a colossal figure whose influence on twentieth-c...)

    2000

Politics

Robert Service's perspectives are post-revisionist and liberal. He is strongly critical of Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, particularly how they handled change and crisis in post-1917.

Service saves his strongest condemnations for the ideology of Marxist communism. In his book "Comrades," Robert Service argues that Marxism was an "infection" and a "virus" that ultimately evolved into a political religion. It kept its followers spellbound by dreams of a better world to come, while hardening and blinding them to the sufferings of the Russian people.

Views

Quotations: "Official Marxism was emptying the minds of its adherents and then filling them with its potent tincture... There had always been a suspicion that the founders of Marxism were imbued with the religiosity of a secular kind. They remained unconsciously influenced by religious ideas about the future perfect society and the salvation of humanity. They were fixed in their godless faith, as solidly as any Jewish or Christian believer. Soviet communists quoted excerpts from books by Marx, Engels, and Lenin after the fashion of religious people with their sacred texts."

"What happened in Russia after October 1917 had caught Lenin and his Bolsheviks by surprise. They recoiled at first and then reconsidered how best to deal with the situation... For a while the communists expected the difficulties to fade away, as the generations of people who had lived under the Russian Empire died off. They also tried to hurry forward a solution by campaigns of incarceration, as well as indoctrination."

"And yet, while Lenin was cunning and untrustworthy, he was also dedicated to the ultimate goal of communism. He enjoyed power; he lusted after it. He yearned to keep his party in power. But he wanted power for a purpose. He was determined that the Bolsheviks should initiate the achievement of a world without exploitation and oppression."

"They [the Bolsheviks] grabbed governmental authority through conspiracy. They were disciplined and centralized and they served their dictatorial leader Lenin with blind devotion. Thus the Russian ‘masses’ were highjacked into acceptance of the coup of October by a tiny intellectual elite of megalomaniacs."

"Trotsky is usually regarded as a person with qualities that put him in a different category to Stalin... But Trotsky was no angel. His lust for dictatorship and terror was barely disguised in the Civil War. He trampled on the civil rights of millions of people, including the industrial workers. His self-absorption was extreme."

Interests

• Russian history

Connections

Robert Service is married. He has four children.