Robert Service | |
|---|---|
 Service speaking at the Tallinn Literature Festival HeadRead in May 2011 | |
| Born | Robert John Service (1947-10-29)29 October 1947 (age 78) United Kingdom |
| Awards | Duff Cooper Prize (2009) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | King's College, Cambridge |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of Oxford |
| Main interests | Russian history (1894–) |
| Notable works | Biographies ofVladimir Lenin,Joseph Stalin, andLeon Trotsky |
Robert John ServiceFBA (born 29 October 1947) is a Britishpost-revisionist historian, academic, and author who has written extensively on the history of theSoviet Union, particularly the period from theOctober Revolution in 1917 tothe death ofJoseph Stalin in 1953. He was until 2013 a professor ofRussian history at theUniversity of Oxford, a fellow ofSt Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior fellow atStanford University'sHoover Institution. He has written biographies ofVladimir Lenin, Stalin, andLeon Trotsky. Service has been a fellow of theBritish Academy since 1998.[1]
Service spent his undergraduate years atKing's College, Cambridge, where he studied Russian andclassical Greek. He went to the universitiesof Essex andof Leningrad for his postgraduate work, and taught atKeele and theSchool of Slavonic and East European Studies, before joining the University of Oxford in 1998.
Between 1986 and 1995, Service published a three-volume biography ofVladimir Lenin. He wrote several works of general history on 20th-century Russia, includingA History of Twentieth-Century Russia. He published a trilogy of biographies on the three most importantBolshevik leaders:Lenin (2000),Stalin (2004), andTrotsky (2009).
His biography of Trotsky was strongly criticised by Service'sHoover Institution colleague Bertrand Mark Patenaude in a review for theAmerican Historical Review.[2] Patenaude, reviewing Service's book alongside a rebuttal by the TrotskyistDavid 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".[3] Service responded that the book's factual errors were minor and that Patenaude's own book on Trotsky presented Trotsky as a "noble martyr". The book was criticised byHermann Weber, a German historian ofcommunism who led a campaign to preventSuhrkamp 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'sJewish origins, implicitly accusing him ofantisemitism, and Service's recourse to "formulas associated withStalinist propaganda" for the purpose of discrediting Trotsky.[4][3] Suhrkamp announced in February 2012 that it would publish a German translation of Robert Service'sTrotsky in July 2012.[5] The book won theDuff Cooper Prize in the publication year 2009.[1]
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