Robert Service (historian)

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Robert Service (2011)

Robert John Service (born October 29, 1947 ) is a British historian . His research focus is Russian history . Service taught until his retirement in 2013 as professor of Russian history at St Antony's College at the University of Oxford , of which he is a fellow . He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution .

Life

Service studied modern languages ​​(including Russian) at King's College at the University of Cambridge with a master’s degree. He then continued his studies at the University of Essex , where he received a Masters degree and a Ph.D. acquired in Government , and also studied at the University of Leningrad . He taught at Keele University and the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London before becoming Professor at Oxford in 1998 .

Service is a fellow of the British Academy . He is best known for numerous books on Russian history in the 20th century, especially the Russian Revolution, and for biographies on Lenin , Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky . His biography on Trotsky received the Duff Cooper Prize in 2009 .

Trotsky biography

His biography of Trotsky completes his trilogy of biographies of the leaders of the Russian Revolution ( Lenin , Stalin ) and, like this one, addresses itself to a wider audience. Service had resolved to present a critical biography of Trotsky, who, in the opinion of Service, would have installed just as violent a regime as Stalin in the Soviet Union had he remained in power. Service does not regard him as an opponent of party dictatorship and terror in the revolution, but as one of its initiators.

Scientific reception

In his review in H-Soz-Kult in 2010, Andreas Oberender (Humboldt University Berlin) certified Service to deal fairly with Trotsky, even if, according to his biography, “there is not much left of Trotsky's once bloated reputation”.

In 2011, Bertrand Patenaude , Service's colleague at the Hoover Institute and himself the author of a biography of Trotsky, criticized Service in the American Historical Review for “an eagerness to put Trotsky down”. In addition, the book received mostly negative reviews.

Others

Referring to the criticism of Patenaude and the chairman of the Socialist Equality Party , David North , fourteen German scholars - including Hermann Weber , Oskar Negt , Bernhard Bayerlein, Heiko Haumann , Oliver Rathkolb , Mario Keßler and Peter Steinbach - protested in an open letter against the German publication by Suhrkamp Verlag and call it a "diatribe". On Deutschlandfunk , Niels Beintker described this criticism of Service's "justified [...] attempt to demystify" Trotsky as a "very crude [...] absurd debate". In July 2012, Suhrkamp published the translation largely unchanged; it received mixed reviews.

Works

  • Lenin: a biography . Translation of Holger Fliessbach . Munich: Beck, 2000. ISBN 3-406-46641-9
  • Stalin: A Biography , Harvard University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-674-02258-4
  • Trotsky: A biography . London: Macmillan, 2009 ISBN 978-1-4050-5346-4
  • A History of Modern Russia. From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century , Harvard University Press, 3rd edition 2009 (first as A history of Twentieth-Century Russia , Penguin 1997).
  • as editor: Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution , School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Palgrave Macmillan 1992 (in Service the introduction and the chapter on industrial workers).
  • The Russian Revolution 1900–1927 , Studies in European History, Palgrave Macmillan, 4th edition 2009.
  • Spies & Commissars. Bolshevik Russia and the West , Macmillan 2011.
  • Comrades: A History of World Communism , Harvard University Press 2010.
  • Russia: Experiment with a People , Harvard University Press 2006.
  • The End of the Cold War 1985–1991 , Public Affairs 2015.
  • Editor with Silvio Pons: Dizionario del comunismo nel XX secolo , Einaudi 2007 (English edition: Dictionary of 20th Century Communism, Princeton University Press, 2010).
  • Architectural Problems of Reform in the Soviet Union: From Design to Collapse , in: Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Volume 2, Issue 2, 2001, pp. 7-17.
  • Stalinism and the Soviet State Order , in: Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2003, pp. 7-23.
  • Military Policy, International Relations and Soviet Security after October 1917 , in: Russia: War, Peace and Diplomacy. Essays in the Honor of John Erickson, London, 2004.
  • Soviet Political Leadership and “Sovietological” Modeling, in: Leading Russia: Putin in Perspective: Essays in Honor of Archie Brown , Oxford, 2005.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Review excerpts from Perlentaucher
  2. ^ Andreas Oberender, review in Hsozkult , June 17, 2010
  3. ↑ McLemee, Scott: The Re-Assassination of Leon Trotsky , Inside Higher Ed , July 8, 2011.
  4. ^ Bertrand M. Patenaude: Robert Service. Trotsky: A Biography . David North. In Defense of Leon Trotsky . (book review) In: The American Historical Review . 116, No. 3, June 2011, pp. 900-902. doi : 10.1086 / ahr.116.3.900 .
  5. ↑ Alex Marshall: Trotsky. A biography . (book review) In: Critique . 38, No. 4, 2010, pp. 687-689. doi : 10.1080 / 03017605.2010.522132 .
  6. ^ Geoffrey Swain: Trotsky: A Biography by Robert Service . (book review) In: Europe-Asia Studies . 62, No. 5, July 2010, pp. 854-856.
  7. ↑ Kevin Murphy: Trotsky: Biography . (book review) In: Revolutionary Russia . 24, No. 1, 2011, pp. 96-98.
  8. ↑ Open letter to Suhrkamp Verlag
  9. ↑ Niels Beintker: Between a diatribe and a historical flashback to Leon Trotsky . deutschlandfunk.de , July 23, 2012, accessed June 20, 2016.
  10. ↑ Lorenz Jäger : Chronicle of an announced biography: Trotsky, the good . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 6, 2012, accessed June 20, 2016.
  11. ↑ Gerd Koenen : Controversial biography: With the ice ax . In: Die Zeit from July 12, 2012, accessed on June 20, 2016.
  12. ↑ Reiner Tosstorff: “There is still life in the old fellow Trotsky”. On the biography of Trotsky by Robert Service. In: Mittelweg 36 (2010), issue 1 ( online on the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation website , accessed on June 20, 2016).
  13. ↑ Overview at Perlentaucher , accessed on June 20, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Service, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Service, Robert John (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 29, 1947