Robert Service, historian and professor at Oxford University, will give an online lecture tomorrow Wednesday at 7 p.m. entitled Ukraine: From the October Revolution to Today, presented by the Escuela Diplomática (Paseo Juan XXIII, 5).
Robert John Service (29 October 1947) is one of the great historians of the last 30 years specialising in Russia. He is also a writer, broadcaster and lecturer at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He was one of the first Western historians to gain access to Soviet archives after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Service studied at Cambridge University, where he devoted himself to the study of Russian and Ancient Greek. He then moved to the Universities of Essex and St Petersburg for postgraduate studies, and taught at Keele, London School of Slavonic Studies, before establishing himself as a lecturer at Oxford University in 1998.
Between 1986 and 1995, Service published a monumental three-volume biography of Vladimir Illich Lenin. He has written several works on the General History of Russia in the 20th century, which have found a wide readership among the general public. He undertook the production of a trilogy of biographies of Soviet leaders Lenin (2000), Stalin (2004) and Trotsky (2009), all published in English. Many critics have praised Service for his dispassionate analyses of Russia’s past century. This, combined with his research skills and literary style, has made Robert Service one of the most popular historians of the former USSR.
