This is undoubtedly the best study of Lenin the political leader written to date, and it is likely to remain so for some time.' - John Barber, London Review of Books; ...Robert Service...has provided a rich, balanced portrait of the Bolshevik leader that presents the case for the defence as well as the prosecution.' - John Keep, Times Literary Supplement;The final volume of Robert Service's major trilogy on Lenin's political life takes the account from the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918 to the Bolshevik leader's death in 1924. Attention is paid to the military, political and economic conditions as they changed; to the internal pressures of the party's politics; to ideological imperatives; and to one man's reaction to events and situations he had only imperfectly anticipated. The volume incorporates not only the post-1985 documentary revelations but also the results of the author's searches in the Moscow archives since 1991.

In this second volume of his Lenin trilogy, Robert Service builds on the approach established in the first. He emphasises the extraordinary circumstances in Russia and the world enabling Lenin to come to power in 1917. He also details ways whereby Lenin led a turbulent Bolshevik party and adjusted its policies so as to gain authority in the soviets. Lenin the crafty and pragmatic politican as well as the utopian and merciless class warrior are portrayed.

Lenin's politics continue to reverberate around the world even after the end of the USSR. His name elicits revulsion and reverence, yet Lenin the man remains largely a mystery. This biography shows us Lenin as we have never seen him, in his full complexity as revolutionary, political leader, thinker, and private person.

Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870, the son of a schools inspector and a doctor's daughter, Lenin was to become the greatest single force in the Soviet revolution--and perhaps the most influential politician of the twentieth century. Drawing on sources only recently discovered, Robert Service explores the social, cultural, and political catalysts for Lenin's explosion into global prominence. His book gives us the vast panorama of Russia in that awesome vortex of change from tsarism's collapse to the establishment of the communist one-party state. Through the prism of Lenin's career, Service focuses on dictatorship, the Marxist revolutionary dream, civil war, and interwar European politics. And we are shown how Lenin, despite the hardships he inflicted, was widely mourned upon his death in 1924.

Service's Lenin is a political colossus but also a believable human being. This biography stresses the importance of his supportive family and of its ethnic and cultural background. The author examines his education, upbringing, and the troubles of his early life to explain the emergence of a rebel whose devotion to destruction proved greater than his love for the "proletariat" he supposedly served. We see how his intellectual preoccupations and inner rage underwent volatile interaction and propelled his career from young Marxist activist to founder of the communistparty and the Soviet state--and how he bequeathed to Russia a legacy of political oppression and social intimidation that has yet to be expunged.

This new and revised edition of poems about the men and women of the North features the most loved ballads by Robert Service, and is illustrated with lively art by Marilen Van Nimwegen. While living in Whitehorse, Robert Service wrote The Cremation of Sam McGee, and other well-known poems. He wrote and published into his mid-eighties. He was quoted as saying, I just go for a walk and come back with a poem in my pocket.

Drawing on a wealth of unexplored material - available for the first time since the collapse of the former Soviet Union - Robert Service's biography of Stalin is the most authoritative yet published. It concentrates not simply on Stalin as dedicated bureaucrat or serial political killer, but on a fuller assessment of his formative interactions in Georgia, his youthful revolutionary activism, his relationship with Lenin, with his family, and with his party members. 'This is effectively the first full biography since perestroika to encompass the economic, political, diplomatic, military, administrative and, above all, ideological dimensions, as well as the personal aspects of Stalin's colossal life . . . Gritty and unshowy, but enlightened by Service's compelling characterisation, magisterial analysis and dry wit, this outstanding biography of lightly worn authority, wide research and superb intuition will be read for decades' Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of STALIN: The Court of the Red Tsar Sunday Times

Russia had an extraordinary twentieth century, undergoing upheaval and transformation. Updating his acclaimed "History of Modern Russia," Robert Service provides a panoramic perspective on a country whose Soviet past encompassed revolution, civil war, mass terror, and two world wars. He shows how seven decades of communist rule, which penetrated every aspect of Soviet life, continue to influence Russia today. This new edition takes the story from 2002 through the entire presidency of Vladimir Putin to the election of his successor, Dmitri Medvedev.

In Blood on the Snow, Robert Service returns to the subject that has formed the backbone of his long and distinguished career: the Russian Revolution. For Service, the great unanswered question is how to reconcile the two vital narratives that underpin the extraordinary but troubled events of 1917. One puts the blame squarely on Tsar Nicholas II and on Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government that deposed him. The other is the view from the bottom, that of the workers and peasants who wanted democratic socialism, not the Bolshevik dictatorship imposed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his successors. Service's vivid and revisionist account spans the period from the outbreak of the First World War to Lenin’s death in 1924. In it, he reveals that key seeds of the revolution were sown by the Tsar's decision to join the war against Germany in 1914. He shows with brutal clarity how those events played out, eventually leading to the establishment of the totalitarian Soviet regime, which would endure for the next seven decades. Nicholas II, Kerensky and Lenin are to the fore, but Service enriches his narrative by drawing on little-known diaries of those such as the Vologda peasant Alexander Zamaraev, the NCO Alexei Shtukaturov and the Moscow accounts clerk Nikita Okunev. Through the testimony of these ‘ordinary’ people, Service traces the tortuous path that Russia took through war, revolution and civil war.

Vladimir Putin has dominated Russian politics since Boris Yeltsin relinquished the presidency in his favour in May 2000. He served two terms as president, before himself relinquishing the post to his prime minister, Dimitri Medvedev, only to return to presidential power for a third time in 2012.

Putin’s rule, whether as president or prime minister, has been marked by a steady increase in domestic repression and international assertiveness. Despite this, there have been signs of liberal growth and Putin – and Russia – now faces a far from certain future.

In Kremlin Winter, Robert Service, acclaimed biographer of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky and one of our finest historians of modern Russia, brings his deep understanding of that country to bear on the man who leads it. He reveals a premier who cannot take his supremacy for granted, yet is determined to impose his will not only on his closest associates but on society at large. It is a riveting insight into power politics as Russia faces a blizzard of difficulties both at home and abroad.

In July 1917, when the Provisional Government issued a warrant for his arrest, Lenin fled from Petrograd; later that year, the October Revolution swept him to supreme power. In the short intervening period he spent in Finland, he wrote his impassioned, never-completed masterwork on The State and Revolution . . . This powerfully argued book offers both the rationale for the new regime and a wealth of insights into Leninist politics. It was here that Lenin justified his personal interpretation of Marxism, savaged his opponents and set out his trenchant views on class conflict, the lessons of earlier revolutions, the dismantling of the bourgeois state and the replacement of capitalism by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Immediately established as a standard text, it was selectively cited by leaders from Stalin to Gorbachev in support of programmes which differed in important ways. As both historical document and political statement, its importance can hardly be exaggerated.

In this second volume of his Lenin trilogy, Robert Service builds on the approach established in the first. He emphasises the extraordinary circumstances in Russia and the world enabling Lenin to come to power in 1917. He also details ways whereby Lenin led a turbulent Bolshevik party and adjusted its policies so as to gain authority in the soviets. Lenin the crafty and pragmatic politican as well as the utopian and merciless class warrior are portrayed. 'Dr Service has made excellent use of freshly available original documents but even without them this book would have been outstanding' - Susan Walker, International Affairs;'...immensely detailed, scholarly biography...' - Richard Pendry, New Statesman and Society;'Robert Service takes such a most welcome broad view in the second volume of his projected trilogy...For this eagerly awaited end to his labours, all power to the Service elbow' - Paul Dukes, Times Higher Education Supplement

In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, the Western powers were anxious to prevent the spread of Bolshevism across Europe. Lenin and Trotsky were equally anxious that the Communist vision they were busy introducing in Russia should do just that. But neither side knew anything about the other. The revolution and Russia's withdrawal from the First World War had ensured a diplomatic exodus from Moscow and the usual routes to vital information had been closed off. Into this void stepped an extraordinary collection of opportunists, journalists and spies - sometimes indeed journalists who were spies and vice versa: in Moscow Britain's Arthur Ransome, the American John Reed and Sidney Reilly - 'Ace of Spies' - all traded information and brokered deals between Russia and the West; in Berlin, Paris and London, the likes of Maxim Litvinov, Adolf Ioffe and Kamenev tried to infiltrate the political elite and influence foreign policy to the Bolshevik's advantage. Robert Service, acclaimed historian and one of our finest commentators on matters Soviet, turns his meticulous eye to this ragtag group of people and, with narrative flair and impeccable research, reveals one of the great untold stories of the twentieth century.

Robert Service completes his masterful trilogy on the founding figures of the Soviet Union in an eagerly anticipated, authoritative biography of Leon Trotsky.

Trotsky is perhaps the most intriguing and, given his prominence, the most understudied of the Soviet revolutionaries. Using new archival sources including family letters, party and military correspondence, confidential speeches, and medical records, Service offers new insights into Trotsky. He discusses Trotsky s fractious relations with the leaders he was trying to bring into a unified party before 1914; his attempt to disguise his political closeness to Stalin; and his role in the early 1920s as the progenitor of political and cultural Stalinism. Trotsky evinced a surprisingly glacial and schematic approach to making revolution. Service recounts Trotsky s role in the botched German revolution of 1923; his willingness to subject Europe to a Red Army invasion in the 1920s; and his assumption that peasants could easily be pushed onto collective farms. Service also sheds light on Trotsky s character and personality: his difficulties with his Jewish background, the development of his oratorical skills and his preference for writing over politicking, his inept handling of political factions and coldness toward associates, and his aversion to assuming personal power.

Although Trotsky s followers clung to the stubborn view of him as a pure revolutionary and a powerful intellect unjustly hounded into exile by Stalin, the reality is very different. This illuminating portrait of the man and his legacy sets the record straight.

Lenin is a colossal figure whose influence on twentieth-century history cannot be underestimated. Robert Service has written a calmly authoritative biography on this seemingly unknowable figure. Making use of recently opened archives, he has been able to piece together the private as well as the public life, giving the first complete picture of Lenin. This biography simultaneously provides an account of one of the greatest turning points in modern history. Through the prism of Lenin's career, Service examines events such as the October Revolution and the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, the one-party state, economic modernisation, dictatorship, and the politics of inter-war Europe. In discovering the origins of the USSR, he casts light on the nature of the state and society which Lenin left behind and which have not entirely disappeared after the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991. 'Immensely scholarly but also vivid and readable. This is a splendid book, much the best that I have ever read about Lenin ...I was overwhelmed by the power and vividness of this portrait.' Dominic Lieven, Sunday Telegraph 'He has managed skilfully to depict the surreal life of an obsessive, brilliant and stubborn individual' Guardian 'Lenin's life was politics, but Service has succeeded in keeping Lenin the man in focus throughout . . . This book deserves a place among the best studies of one of the most fascinating figures in modern history' Harold Shukman, The Times

In 1986 Kids Can Press published an edition of Robert Service's "The Cremation of Sam McGee" illustrated by painter Ted Harrison, who used his signature broad brushstrokes and unconventional choice of color to bring this gritty narrative poem to life. Evoking both the spare beauty and the mournful solitude of the Yukon landscape, Harrison's paintings proved the perfect match for Service's masterpiece about a doomed prospector adrift in a harsh land. Harrison's Illustrator's Notes on each page enhanced both poem and illustrations by adding valuable historical background. Upon its original publication, many recognized the book as an innovative approach to illustrating poetry for children. For years The Cremation of Sam McGee has stood out as a publishing landmark, losing none of its appeal both as a read-aloud and as a work of art. Kids Can Press proudly publishes this deluxe hardcover twentieth anniversary edition -- complete with a spot-varnished cover, new cover art and heavy coated stock -- of a book that remains as entrancing as a night sky alive with the vibrant glow of the Northern Lights.

Almost two decades have passed since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Robert Service, one of our finest historians of modern Russia, sets out to examine the history of communism throughout the world. His uncomfortable conclusion - and an important message for the twenty-first century - is that although communism in its original form is now dead or dying, the poverty and injustice that enabled its rise are still dangerously alive. Unsettling, compellingly written and brilliantly argued, this is a superb work of history and one that demands to be read. 'Bears all the hallmarks of a classic work of historical literature ... the true international legacy of communism [is] analysed to magisterial effect in this exhilarating work' Hwyel Williams New Statesman 'One of the best-ever studies of the subject ... a remarkable accomplishment' Economist 'An outstanding book, written with grace and style' Daily Telegraph '[A] brilliantly distilled world history of communism ... Confronted by Service's amazing array of evidence to show that communism could only ever have flourished under conditions of extreme and all-pervasive oppression, only the determinedly softheaded would try to argue with him' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

Revolutionary practitioner, theorist, factional chief, sparkling writer, 'ladies' man' (e.g., his affair with Frieda Kahlo), icon of the Revolution, anti-Jewish Jew, philosopher of everyday life, grand seigneur of his household, father and hunted victim, Trotsky lived a brilliant life in extraordinary times. Robert Service draws on hitherto unexamined archives and on his profound understanding of Russian history to draw a portrait of the man and his legacy, revealing that though his followers have represented Trotsky as a pure revolutionary soul and a powerful intellect unjustly hounded into exile by Stalin and his henchmen. The reality is very different, as this masterful and compelling biography reveals.

In March 1917, Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All the Russias, abdicated and the dynasty that had ruled an empire for three hundred years was forced from power by revolution. In this masterful and forensic study, Robert Service examines the last year Nicholas's reign and the months between that momentous abdication and his death, with his family, in Ekaterinburg in July 1918.

Drawing on the Tsar's own diaries and other hitherto unexamined contemporary records, The Last of the Tsars reveals a man who was almost entirely out of his depth, perhaps even willfully so. It is also a compelling account of the social, economic and political foment in Russia in the aftermath of Alexander Kerensky's February Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the beginnings of Lenin's Soviet republic.

Robert Service's The Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-first Century provides a superb panorama of Russia in the modern age. Russia's recent past has encompassed revolution, civil war, mass terror and two world wars, and the country is still undergoing huge change. In his acclaimed history, now revised and updated with a new introduction and final chapter, Robert Service explores the complex, changing interaction between rulers and ruled from Tsar Nicholas II, through the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917; from Lenin and Stalin through to Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin and beyond. This new edition also discusses Russia's unresolved economic and social difficulties and its determination to regain its leading role on the world stage and explains how, despite the recent years of de-communization, the seven decades of communist rule which penetrated every aspect of life still continue to influence Russia today. 'Always well-informed and balanced in his judgements, clear and concise in his analysis ... Service is extremely good on Soviet politics' Orlando Figes, Sunday Telegraph 'A fine book ... it is a dizzying tale and Service tells it well; he has none of the ideological baggage that has so often bedevilled Western histories of Russia' Brian Moynahan, Sunday Times Robert Service is a Fellow of the British Academy and of St Antony's College, Oxford. He has written several books, including the highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography, Russia: Experiment with a People, Stalin: A Biography and Comrades: A History of World Communism, as well as many other books on Russia's past and present. His most recent book, Trotsky, has been shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize.

The first book of its kind to appear since the end of the Cold War, this indispensable reference provides encyclopedic coverage of communism and its impact throughout the world in the 20th century. With the opening of archives in former communist states, scholars have found new material that has expanded and sometimes altered the understanding of communism as an ideological and political force. A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism brings this scholarship to students, teachers, and scholars in related fields. In more than 400 concise entries, the book explains what communism was, the forms it took, and the enormous role it played in world history from the Russian Revolution through the collapse of the Soviet Union and beyond. * Examines the political, intellectual, and social influences of communism around the globe * Features contributions from an international team of 160 scholars * Includes more than 400 entries on major topics, such as: * Figures: Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Castro, Gorbachev * Events: Cold War, Prague Spring, Cultural Revolution, Sandinista Revolution * Ideas and concepts: Marxism-Leninism, cult of personality, labor * Organizations and movements: KGB, Comintern, Gulag, Khmer Rouge * Related topics: totalitarianism, nationalism, antifascism, anticommunism, McCarthyism * Guides readers to further research through bibliographies, cross-references, and an index

Robert Service wrote in the golden years of the Klondike -- of the rough and ready men, and women just as tough. No-one in Robert's world (real or imagined) minced words or had any self-consciousness about them. It was live and let live and sometimes kill or be killed. Reading his poems transports us back to that frozen place in nature when it was literally every man and every woman for him/herself, yet Robert conveys to us not only a sensitivity (in his poem extolling the simple light switch -- something quite novel in those times, especially in the Klondike), but the beauties he saw in the others -- gathered around the village's first "grammyphone," hearing the voice of "canned man" coming from it -- some savages taking to their canoes because it seems demonic, yet others equally savage, enraptured by this miracle of sound. Robert Service touches the heart and soul of the rough and raw Klondike in the early 1900's, and shows us the soul's emotions and colors from inky black to pure gold.