1947–
A contentious biographer of Soviet history
He introduced his Trotsky biography with the words: 'If Mercader's ice axe didn't finish Trotsky off, I hope my book does.'
Robert Service is a British historian of the Soviet Union whose work ranges across the political history from the Revolution to Stalin's death. His biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky interpret individual choices alongside the structures of the revolutionary state. His account of Beria's elimination as a struggle shaped not only by Beria's crimes but also by his post-Stalin reform proposals has made him a significant, contested voice in the historiography.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1979Published The Bolshevik Party in Revolution
- 1986–1995Published the three-volume Lenin: A Political Life
- 1998–2013Professor of Russian History, University of Oxford
- 1998–현재Fellow of the British Academy
- 2000Published Lenin: A Biography
- 2004Published Stalin: A Biography
- 2009Published Trotsky: A Biography and won the Duff Cooper Prize
- 2011Published Spies and Commissars
Related historical events
The Trotsky Biography and the Historiographical Controversy
The most contested of Service's works is his 2009 Trotsky: A Biography (Duff Cooper Prize-winner). He regarded Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky as fundamentally almost indistinguishable figures, and claimed in his preface that it was 'the first full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone outside of Russia who is not a Trotskyist.' The Anglo-American press was largely favourable: Simon Sebag Montefiore called it 'an outstanding biography,' and John Gray 'the best biography of Trotsky to date.' The academic reception differed sharply. His Hoover Institution colleague Bertrand Patenaude, reviewing the book in the American Historical Review, counted dozens of factual errors and concluded it 'fails to meet the basic standards of historical scholarship.' The Trotskyist David North answered with In Defense of Leon Trotsky (2010), and in 2011 fourteen German and Austrian historians and social scientists wrote to Suhrkamp Verlag opposing a German edition over factual errors and problematic treatment of Trotsky's Jewish origins; the German translation nevertheless appeared in 2012. Sheila Fitzpatrick challenged Service's premise that totalitarian despotism would have followed under Trotskyist rule, noting he supplied no new archival material. The episode shows the study of the Soviet revolutionary leadership remains an arena of competing political interpretation, and it fixed Service's standing as a contentious biographer.