A contentious biographer of Soviet history
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.
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