Robert Service (historian)
Robert Service (historian)
Robert John Service 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 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 Univ
"The Russian Empire was deeply fissured between the government and the tsar’s subjects; between the capital and the provinces; between the educated and the uneducated; between Western and Russian ideas; between the rich and the poor; between privilege and oppression; between contemporary fashion and centuries-old custom."
"The Soviet communist leadership may have magnified the prospects of European revolution but it did not invent them out of nothing. Country after country to the west of Russia was experiencing disorder and discontent. Russia itself emerged under Bolshevik rule from years of civil war and foreign armed intervention. The victor powers in the Great War had irresistible force at their disposal if only they could muster the will to deploy it. But they increasingly lacked that will. The Western Allies had not had properly agreed strategic aims since at least 1917, when America joined them."
"Parvus denied that universal suffrage was an end in itself since the middle class would always had ways to manipulate the electoral system. Freedom could not be begged for: it had to be won. The bureaucracy and officer corps had to be eliminated. What was needed, in fact, was not just an uprising as demanded by the Bolsheviks but a commitment to a struggle to make the revolution permanent."
