Robert Service is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Lenin and Stalin (both published by Pan Macmillan), A History of Twentieth-Century Russia and Russia: Experiment with a People as well as many other books on Russia's past and present. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and Dean of St Antony's College, Oxford. He is married with four children.
[A] brilliantly distilled world history of communism. -- Craig
Brown "Mail on Sunday" (05/06/2007)
[A] welcome comprehensive volume arrating the history of world
communism. -- G. A. McBeath "Choice" (11/01/2007)
In "Comrades!", Robert Service presents a lively and detailed
account of the damage that was done in the name of "building
socialism."..He lucidly explains how the Bolsheviks gradually
imposed their will on an impoverished and often resentful populace.
-- Michael Kazin "Democracy Journal" (06/01/2007)
Robert Service's "Comrades" is a timely and ambitious book.
Embroiled as we are with Islamic terrorism, the 20th-century
struggle between world communism and western capitalism seems as
remote now as the 1914 rivalries of kings and emperors must have
seemed in 1945. But this was an equally desperate battle for ideas
and power. Service strips away the illusions about communism that
beguiled generations of admirers. From the moment in 1917 when
Lenin forced the disparate revolutionary parties in Russia under
his sway, communism became a system based on state terror and the
dictatorship of elites in the name of the proletariat. -- Tim
Gardam "The Observer" (05/13/2007)
Service critically surveys communism's entire history for a
general-interest readership... A panoramic introduction to the
ideology, Service's account of communism's idealists and tyrants
provides solid grounding in the subject. -- Gilbert Taylor
"Booklist" (04/15/2007)
Service has read widely--using the extensive archives and poster
collection of Stanford University's Hoover Institution to good
effect--and he has organised his material in an analytical
narrative that sweeps the reader along for 500 pages. -- Michael
Burleigh "Sunday Telegraph" (05/06/2007)
Service has taken [on] a huge subject but he more than succeeds in
doing it justice in this sparkling and thought-provoking
narrative...[An] engrossing history. -- Richard Overy "Literary
Review" (05/01/2007)
The book succeeds in explaining what all the fuss was about,
something that a whole generation that has grown up in the
aftermath of communism's collapse needs to know. -- Lewis H.
Siegelbaum "St. Petersburg Times" (06/08/2007)
The decency of communism's ideals and the horror of its effects
form the basis of Robert Service's masterly handling of the
beginning, progress and (all but) end of communism. Service sees
the miseries and tyranny which communists fought against; and he
allows credit where it is due, as when he writes of Castro's regime
that 'the poor of the island benefited most from the revolution.
Blacks in particular were helped by government efforts to improve
conditions.' -- John Lloyd "Financial Times" (06/30/2007)
To the best of my knowledge, Robert Service's "Comrades!" is the
first history of world communism. It includes every communist
state, extinct and surviving, as well as major communist parties
and movements around the world. It is a daunting undertaking that
required mastery of vast amounts of source materials and the skill
to make judicious choices among them...A rich repository of
information and insight and should be required reading in
institutions of higher education around the world. -- Paul
Hollander "New York Sun" (06/27/2007)
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