Robert Service

He has been a fellow of the British Academy since 1998.

Robert Service studied at Saint Petersburg State University, University of Essex and King's College. The recorded working language is English. Employment is recorded with University of London, University of Oxford and Keele University. Works named in the authority record are Lenin: A Biography.

• Name — Robert Service • Honorific Suffix — FBA • Born — 29 October 1947 • Education — * King's College, Cambridge • University of Essex • Saint Petersburg State University • Awards — Duff Cooper Prize (2009) • Work Institutions — University of Oxford • Main Interests — Russian history (1894–) • Major Works — Biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky

Service studied Russian and classical Greek at King's College, Cambridge, and attended the University of Essex and Saint Petersburg State University for his postgraduate work. He taught at Keele and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, before joining the University of Oxford 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 biographies on the most important Bolshevik leaders: Lenin (2000), Stalin (2004), and Trotsky (2009). The latter won the Duff Cooper Prize in 2009. Suhrkamp Verlag announced in February 2012 that it would publish a German translation. It was strongly criticised by Service's Hoover Institution colleague Bertrand Patenaude in a review for the American Historical Review, asserting that it contained numerous errors and distortions.

• The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organisational Change 1917–1923 (1979) • Lenin: A Political Life (in three volumes: 1985, 1991 and 1995) • A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (1997) • The Penguin History of Modern Russia From Tsarism to the 21st Century (1997) • A History of Modern Russia, from Nicholas II to Putin (1998, Second edition in 2003) • The Russian Revolution, 1900–27 (Studies in European History) (1999) • Lenin: A Biography (2000) • Russia: Experiment with a People (2002) • Stalin: A Biography (2004), Oxford, 715 pages ill. (2004) • Comrades: A World History of Communism (2007) • Trotsky: A Biography (2009) • Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West (2011) • The End of the Cold War: 1985–1991 (2015) • The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution (2017) • Russia and Its Islamic World (2017) • Kremlin Winter: Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin (2019) • Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924 (2023) • The August Coup: The Destruction of the Soviet Union and the Making of a New Russia 1985-1991 (2026)