Robert Service

The first full-scale biography of Stalin in twenty years reveals the complex and fascinating story of the Soviet dictator, from his dysfunctional childhood in Soviet Georgia, through his education and early political activism, to his tyrannical control over the Soviet Union and the legacy of his reign.

A Biography

Stalin

Trotsky

Lenin's politics still reverberate around the world even after the death of the USSR. His name elicits revulsion and reverence. Yet Lenin the man remains largely a mystery. This biography reveals Lenin in his full complexity as a revolutionary, political leader, thinker, and private person. 50 halftones. 3 maps.

Lenin

The Cremation of Sam McGee

Songs of a Sourdough

Professor of Russian History Robert Service

Trotsky is perhaps the most intriguing and, given his prominence, the most understudied of the Soviet revolutionaries. Using new archival sources, Robert Service offers new insights. He discusses Trotsky's fractious relations with the leaders he was trying to unify; 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. 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.--From publisher description.

اشترى، بىژن

کاهن معبد سرخ

تروتسکى

لنین

Mariken Van Nimwegen

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.

The Best of Robert Service

Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin

Kremlin Winter

"A British historian and author investigates the final years of the Cold War from both sides of the Iron Curtain, discussing the relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev whose unprecedented, historic cooperation worked against the odds to end the arms race,"--NoveList.

The End of the Cold War, 1985-1991

Robert Service here presents a comprehensive overview of 20th-century Russian history that treats the years from 1917 to 2000 as a single period and analyses the peculiar mixture of political, economic and social ingredients that made up the Soviet compound.

A History of Modern Russia from Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin

Ryska revolutionen, 1900-1927,

Russia has long played an influential part in its world of Islam, and not all the dimensions are as widely understood as they ought to be. In Russia and Its Islamic World, Robert Service examines Russia's interactions with Islam at home and around the globe and pinpoints the tsarist and Soviet legacy, current complications, and future possibilities. The author details how the Russian encounter with Islam was close and problematic long before the twenty-first century and how Russia has recently chosen to interfere in Muslim states of the Middle East, building alliances and making enemies. Service reveals how some features of the present-day relationship continue past policies; others are starkly and perilously different, making the current moment in global affairs dangerous for both Russians and the rest of us. He describes how the Kremlin dominates Muslims in the Russian Federation, exerts a deep influence on the Muslim-inhabited states on Russia's southern frontiers, and has lunged militarily and politically into the Middle East. Foreign Muslims, he shows, do not value the leadership in Moscow except as a means to an end; Putin's pose as a friend of the Islamic world is no more than a pose--and a hypocritical one at that.

From the Mongol Conquest to the Syrian Military Intervention

Russia and Its Islamic World

A riveting account of the last eighteen months of Tsar Nicholas II's life and reign from one of the finest Russian historians writing today.

Nicholas II and the Russia Revolution

The Last of the Tsars

A riveting account of the last eighteen months of Tsar Nicholas II's life and reign from one of our finest historians of Russia.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. Now, on the hundredth anniversary of that revolution, Robert Service, the eminent historian of Russia, examines Nicholas's reign in the year before his abdication and the months between that momentous date and his death, with his family, in Ekaterinburg in July 1918.The story has been told many times, but Service's profound understanding of the period and his forensic examination of hitherto untapped sources, including the Tsar's diaries and recorded conversations, shed remarkable new light on his reign, also revealing the kind of ruler Nicholas believed himself to have been, contrary to the disastrous reality.The Last of the Tsars is a masterful study of 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.PRAISE FOR ROBERT SERVICE"A magisterial account of a turning point in modern history, whose intellectual rigour and robustness make it unlikely to be bettered" Spectator on The End of the Cold War"Service's cast list of journalists, diplomats, agents and their lovers is a joy . . . a winning combination of scholarship, narrative drive and detail" Observer on Spies and Commissars"Seldom has the pathology of the revolutionary type, and its murderous consequences, been more mercilessly exposed than in this exemplary biography" Sunday Times on Trotsky: A Biography

Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution

The early years of Bolshevik rule were marked by dynamic interaction between Russia and the West. These years of civil war in Russia were years when the West strove to understand the new communist regime while also seeking to undermine it. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks tried to spread their revolution across Europe at the same time they were seeking trade agreements that might revive their collapsing economy. This book tells the story of these complex interactions in detail, revealing that revolutionary Russia was shaped not only by Lenin and Trotsky, but by an extraordinary miscellany of people: spies and commissars, certainly, but also diplomats, reporters, and dissidents, as well as intellectuals, opportunistic businessmen, and casual travelers. This is the story of these characters: everyone from the ineffectual but perfectly positioned Somerset Maugham to vain writers and revolutionary sympathizers whose love affairs were as dangerous as their politics. Through this sharply observed exposé of conflicting loyalties, we get a very vivid sense of how diverse the shades of Western and Eastern political opinion were during these years.

The Early Years of the Russian Revolution

Spies and Commissars

ROBERT. SERVICE

Almost two decades after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR, leading historian Robert Service examines the history of communism throughout the world. Comrades! moves from Marx and Lenin to Mao and Castro and beyond to trace communism from its beginnings to the present day. Offering vivid portraits of the protagonists and decisive events in communist history, Service looks not only at the high politics of communist regimes but also at the social conditions that led millions to support communism in so many countries. After outlining communism's origins with Marx and Engels and its first success with Lenin and the Russian Revolution in 1917, Service examines the Soviet bloc, long-lasting regimes like Yugoslavia and Cuba, the Chinese revolution, the spread of communism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and the international links among the hundreds of parties. He covers communism's organization and ideology as well as its general appeal. He looks at abortive communist revolutions and at the ineffectual parties in the United States and elsewhere. Service offers a human view of the story as well as a global analysis. His uncomfortable conclusion--and an important message for the twenty-first century--is that although communism in its original form is now dying or dead, the poverty and injustice that enabled its rise are still dangerously alive. Unsettling and compellingly written, Comrades! is the most comprehensive study of one of the most important movements of the modern world.

A History of World Communism

Comrades!

Robert Service, jeden z najwybitniejszych historyków specjalizujących się w dziejach ZSRS oraz Rosji, autor biografii Lenina, Stalina i Trockiego, opisuje kulisy rządów Putina przed atakiem Rosji na Ukrainę. Władimir Putin rządzi Rosją od ponad 20 lat. Kraj kontrolują wszechobecne siły bezpieczeństwa i propaganda. Ograniczanie wolności obywatelskich czy demokratycznych jest tutaj na porządku dziennym. Pokojowe antyputinowskie i prodemokratyczne demonstracje zawsze kończą się błyskawiczną, brutalną ingerencją służb. Nadal można tu zaobserwować dobrze znany w krajach komunistycznych kult jednostki. Co sami Rosjanie myślą na temat własnego kraju? Jak Polskę widzą z Kremla?

Robert Service

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