Name Robert Service Role Historian | ||
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Born Robert John Service 29 October 1947 (age 77) United Kingdom ( 1947-10-29 ) Main interests Russian history (1917–53) Books Trotsky: A Biography, Lenin: A Biography, Stalin: A Biography, Comrades!: A History of World Co, A History of Twentieth‑Century Russia Similar People Geoffrey Hosking, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Vladimir Lenin | ||
Education University of Cambridge | ||
Q a author robert service
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.
Contents
- Q a author robert service
- Socialist party reply 1 to robert service on trotsky
- Career and criticisms
- Publications
- References
Service is known for his biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky.
Socialist party reply 1 to robert service on trotsky
Career and criticisms
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.
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. He published a trilogy of biographies on the three most important Bolshevik leaders: 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, implicitly accusing him of anti-Semitism, 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.