罗伯特·约翰·瑟维斯

罗伯特·约翰·瑟维斯（Robert John Service 1947年10月29日—）英国历史学家、学者。写作内容主要涉及苏联历史，曾担任牛津大学俄罗斯历史教授，牛津大学圣安东尼学院研究员、斯坦福大学胡佛研究所高级研究员。知名著作包括列宁、托洛茨基、斯大林的传记。

生平

瑟维斯在剑桥大学国王学院就读本科，并学习俄语和古典希腊语。他在埃塞克斯大学和列宁格勒大学读研究生，并在基尔大学和斯拉夫和东欧研究学院任教，于1998年加入牛津大学。

1986年至1995年间，瑟维斯出版了三卷本《弗拉基米尔-列宁传》。他写了几部关于20世纪俄罗斯的一般历史作品，包括《20世纪俄罗斯史》。他出版了关于三位最重要的布尔什维克领导人的三部曲传记。列宁（2000）、斯大林（2004）和托洛茨基（2009）。

他的托洛茨基传记受到了其胡佛研究所同事Bertrand Mark Patenaude在《美国历史评论》的评论中的强烈批评。Patenaude在评论瑟维斯的书和托洛茨基主义者David North的反驳（In Defence of Leon Trotsky）时，指责瑟维斯犯了几十个事实错误，歪曲了证据，"没有认真研究托洛茨基的政治思想"。瑟维斯回应说，该书的事实错误不大，Patenaude自己关于托洛茨基的书把他描述成一个 "高贵的烈士"。该书受到德国共产主义历史学家赫尔曼-韦伯的批评，他领导了一场运动，阻止苏尔坎普出版社在德国出版该书。14位历史学家和社会学家签署了一封致出版社的信。信中列举了 "大量的事实错误"，Service谈到托洛茨基的犹太血统的段落的 "令人厌恶的内涵"，暗指他反犹太主义，以及瑟维斯为了诋毁托洛茨基而采用 "与斯大林主义宣传有关的公式"。 Suhrkamp在2012年2月宣布，它将在2012年7月出版瑟维斯的《托洛茨基》德文译本。 该书在2009年的出版年度获得了达夫-库珀奖。

Robert John Service (born 29 October 1947) is a British post-revisionist historian, academic and author who has written extensively on the history of the Soviet Union, particularly the period from the October Revolution in 1917 to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. He has written biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Stalin and Leon Trotsky.

Until 2013 he was 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. He has been a fellow of the British Academy since 1998.

Career and reception

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.

Works

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. ISBN 0-330-41913-7 (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)