In July 1917, when the Provisional Government issued a warrant for his arrest, Lenin fled from Petrograd; later that year, the October Revolution swept him to supreme power. In the short intervening period he spent in Finland, he wrote his impassioned, never-completed masterwork The State and Revolution. This powerfully argued book offers both the rationale for the new regime and a wealth of insights into Leninist politics. It was here that Lenin justified his personal interpretation of Marxism, savaged his opponents and set out his trenchant views on class conflict, the lessons of earlier...

Russia is now undergoing tremendous changes on several fronts, and its history is likewise ready to be reinterpreted. This collection of essays views Russia in a fresh historical perspective, enabling readers to consider the consequences of a past that still influences any and all attempts to fashion a different Russian future. The dominant theme of this book, then, is the balance of continuity and discontinuity to be found in the history of Russia as seen across several centuries. Thus the contributors to this new volume revisit the past, rethink the present, and reconsider the future of the...

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.

Lenin's politics continue to reverberate around the world even after the end of the USSR. His name elicits revulsion and reverence, yet Lenin the man remains largely a mystery. This biography shows us Lenin as we have never seen him, in his full complexity as revolutionary, political leader, thinker, and private person. Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870, the son of a schools inspector and a doctor's daughter, Lenin was to become the greatest single force in the Soviet revolution--and perhaps the most influential politician of the twentieth century. Drawing on sources only recently...

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.

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...

Robert W. Service (1874-1958) was a Canadian poet best known for his poems about the Canadian North. Service came to Canada when he was 21 hoping to become a cowboy. Instead he ended up working in a bank in the Yukon Territory. "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee" made him famous. During World War 1 he was an ambulance driver and war correspondent. Poems in this collection include The Land God Forgot, The Spell of the Yukon, The Heart of the Sourdough, The Three Voices, The Law of the Yukon, The Parsons Son, The Call of the Wild, The Lone Trail, The Pines, The...

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...