Robert Service (historian)

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Professor Robert John Service (born 29 October 1947) is a historian of Russia. He is a writer, broadcaster and fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford. He was one of the first historians to gain access to the Soviet archives after the collapse of the USSR.

Service spent his undergraduate years at 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 London School of Slavonic Studies before joining Oxford in 1998.

Between 1986 and 1995, Service published a monumental three-volume biography of Lenin. He has also written several works of general history on 20th-century Russia, which have found a wide readership among the general public. He is currently embarked on producing a trilogy of biographies: both Lenin (2000) and Stalin (2004) have been well-received, and Trotsky is in the works. Many critics have praised Service for his dispassionate analyses of Russia's past, and for his lack of ideological fervour. This, combined with his thorough research and engaging writing style, has made Service one of the most popular Western historians of Russia, besides such contemporaries as Orlando Figes, Richard Pipes and Simon Sebag Montefiore.