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...

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...

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.

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...