Robert Service (historian)

Robert Service
Service speaking at the Tallinn Literature Festival HeadRead in May 2011
Born	Robert John Service (1947-10-29) 29 October 1947 (age 69) United Kingdom
Academic work
Main interests	Russian history (1917–53)
Notable works	Biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky

Robert John Service (born 29 October 1947) is a British historian, academic, and author who has written extensively on the history of the Soviet Union, particularly the era from the October Revolution to Stalin's death. He was until 2013 a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Service is known for his biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, respectively.

Service spent his undergraduate years at King's College, 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 School of Slavonic and East European Studies, before joining Oxford University in 1998, where he currently teaches.

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. His trilogy of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks leaders biographies include Lenin (2000), Stalin (2004) and Trotsky (2009).