Robert Service

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.

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 expos (c)f conflicting loyalties, we get a very vivid sense of how diverse the shades of Western and Eastern political opinion were during these years.

The "common man's poet" and "Canadian Kipling" recounts tales from the Klondike gold rush in this compilation of 34 of his best verses. Poems include "The Cremation of Sam McGee," "The Call of the Wild," "The Heart of the Sourdough," "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," and other memorable storytelling verses.

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.

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.

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

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.

Lenin remains to this day a colossal figure: the founder of the Bolshevik faction and one of the most influential leaders of the 20th century. In this critically acclaimed biography, Robert Service – the first historian to have access to Communist Party archives after they were ‘unsealed†– provides a complete portrait of Lenin, set in historical context.

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.

Drawing on previously unpublished archive material, this acclaimed biography of Stalin describes his formative years – emphasizing the importance of his parents, Georgian origins, religious training and his embrace of Marxism, as well as his poetry and voracious reading – to show that the notorious tyrant was ‘a more dynamic and diverse figure†than is generally supposed.

The vigour, humour and rugged rhythms of Robert Service's ballads of Yukon have given them great appeal. This is a collection of 39 poems that relate to his years in North America, and include "Men of the High North", "The Ballad of the Northern Lights" and "Eldorado".

Songs Of A Sourdough" is Robert Service at his best!. This is nature poetry at its finest. Here the Bard Of The Yukon use picture words that place the reader right in the Yukon of old. As you read you can see the stranger stagger in to the Malamute saloon and feel the fifty below gush of air until he closes the door behind him. You will hear him play the piano and see the ghastly look of the Lady that's known as Lou. You too will jump for the floor when the shooting of Dangerous Dan McGrew starts. You too will hear the Call of The Yukon and understand its Law while you come to appreciate The Younger Son.

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.

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.

Here, collected in a single volume, are the most popular verses of the great English-born Canadian poet. His famous ballads of the Klondike are here: "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," "The Spell of the Yukon," and "The Cremation of Sam McGee." Also included are unforgettable portrayals of the artists, grisettes, and models of the merry, tragic life of bohemian Paris, and other verses inspire by the First World War, during which Service drove an ambulance in France. And not to be overlooked are the many expressions of the poet's own homespun philosophy--his comments on women, on life and death, ambition, and success and failure, which strike a responsive chord in the reader's heart. Gaiety, humor, nostalgia, and pathos fill every page, along with the genuine Service ring of virility which has made his verse loved throughout the English reading world.

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.