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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 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.
Service is best known for his 2000, 2004, and 2009 biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, respectively.
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. His trilogy of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks leaders biographies include Lenin (2000), Stalin (2004) and Trotsky (2009). His biography of Trotsky was favourably reviewed in the British and American press on its publication, but two years later was strongly criticised by Service's Hoover Institution colleague Bertrand Patenaude in a review for the American Historical Review.[1] Patenaude, reviewing Service's book alongside a rebuttal by the Trotskyite 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".[2] Service responded that the book's factual errors were minor and that Patenaude's own book on Trotsky presented him as a "noble martyr". In July 2009, prior to the publication of his own book, Service had written a review of Partenaude's publication Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky which he applauded for being "vividly told" but also criticised for neglecting Trotsky's crimes while sharing power in the USSR.
Joseph Stalin, Russian Empire, Saint Petersburg, Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky
World War II, Russia, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Russian language, Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, Colleges of the University of Oxford, Jesus College, Oxford
University of California, Berkeley, Brown University, Silicon Valley, California Institute of Technology, Duke University
Communism, Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, Maoism, Anti-Revisionism
Azerbaijan, Autonomous oblasts of the Soviet Union, Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Robert Service (historian), Soviet Union
Russian empire, Russian language, Ukrainian language, Coyoacán, Socialism
Cold War, Portugal, Marxism, Joseph Stalin, Communism