The Russian Revolution (2026)

Book Review from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924. By Robert Service ISBN 9781529065855

Continuing his popular histories of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Robert Service seeks to look more broadly at events, rather than through personalities and political decisions alone. Rather, he seeks to ‘explore […] how ‘ordinary’ people coped – or failed to cope – with the shattering dislocation of Russian and global affairs’ during the revolutionary period.

He utilises the diaries of the likes of Alexei Shtukaturov, a worker who was conscripted into the Imperial Army, and Alexander Zamaraev, a peasant, too old to be conscripted. Embedded within the stories of events, their own words reveal frustrations and aspirations. In part, this helps unveil the political sophistication of those often dismissed as ignorant peasants (as Service notes, ‘peasant’ was a legal, rather than an economic category). Nonetheless, the frustrations of the peasants form a significant backdrop to the events of the revolution.

Zamaraev lived in Totma district, Vologda, where 92 percent of agricultural land belonged to the state, church, and Imperial family. His diaries reveal concern over conscription, support for the Tsar and for the war, and over access to food as the war continued.

Service effectively brings home the conditions under Tsarism during the war, and helps show how common people were far from passive objects during these great events. At this time, one-third of European Russia was placed under martial law, and 13 million men went through the army (Service notes its harsh discipline.) Many others also laboured in the civilian economy. This fact, and the way that previously toothless local government bodies took on increasing responsibility for welfare provision, such as food and medicine, in a co-ordinated fashion (later to be joined by industrial committees) prefigured the kind of state that was to come out of the war.

Service is critical of Tsar Nicholas, especially his war aim of trying to gain Istanbul (or Tsargrad, as they referred to it) for the Russian empire. Service also notes the racist suppression of Jews and Poles within the Empire, the Tsar’s failure to grapple with its massive structural problems, and the way he vigorously resisted the changes needed to fight a modern mechanised war.

He notes that the Bolsheviks did not expect or want the specific revolution that they found themselves involved in, but that the line of party discipline and a one-party state were part of their core ideas from the very beginning: ‘They opted for force over persuasion; for central authority over democratic accountability’. They had no more legitimacy than the provisional government of Kerensky, but they were more prepared to use force to get their way.

The book draws out the role of the peasants, economically, politically and legally, and the way their frustrations formed a significant part of the backdrop to the drama against which the political leaders played their parts. In his assessments, though, Service does not look at whether there was any alternative path available which could have led to a different outcome.

Pik Smeet

Lenin the man (2002)

Book Review from the February 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lenin: A Biography By Robert Service, Macmillan, London, 2001.

A good, single volume on Lenin is difficult to find; forgive the truism, but the man has tended to be portrayed either as a secular saint or as a vicious, evil psychopath, a sort of left-wing Prince of Darkness. Ten years on from the disintegration of the Soviet bloc through popular revolution and economic stagnation perhaps a cooler assessment of Lenin can be undertaken. The historiography of the Revolutionary and Soviet periods during these ten years – at least in the West and in English, with which the current reviewer is most familiar – have been dominated by right-wing reactionaries, American cold warriors and the descendants of those Russian social classes who were dispossessed by the March and November revolutions. Robert Service, by no means sympathetic to revolutionary socialism, sets himself the task of striking a balance. He is one of the first Western historians to have access to newly opened personal archives of the Ulianov family held in Moscow, and the book deserves attention because of this. The resulting biography is interesting and useful, but at the same time demonstrates the inherent weakness of the form.

Indeed, both the reader with little prior knowledge of Lenin’s life and thought, as well as the historical trivia junkie, will find much to please them. Service vividly recreates Lenin’s childhood, early life and pre-1917 exile, demonstrating well the factors that influenced his social and intellectual development. Vladimir Illich was from a comfortable family of bourgeois outsiders with Tartar and Jewish as well as Russian origins. He grew up in Simbirsk on the Volga, and the Ulianov family were on the social and geographical periphery of the European Russian empire. Elder brother Alexander, a Revolutionary Populist, was executed after his role in actively supporting the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. This gave a personal ingredient to the burgeoning intellectual and political revolt of the precocious Vladimir. On the death of his father Illya in 1886 he became de facto head of the family. His mother, two sisters and younger brother remained close throughout their lives, all three siblings becoming dedicated Bolsheviks themselves. Service develops a fascinating profile of Lenin through his years of exile in Siberia and Western Europe, then later through the October Revolution and into power. He was prolific, intelligent, strong willed, totally dedicated to his cause – the model of the “Professional Revolutionary” he demanded of others. He was also prone to nervous exhaustion and stress, and his massive, self-imposed workload contributed to his lifelong ill health and early death at fifty four.

And so on. Perhaps more interesting, on a deeper level, is the formation of Lenin’s ideas and politics. Here Service correctly identifies Lenin’s enduring fascination with the tradition of Russian populist terrorism, and its influence on his praxis. In particular, Lenin was influenced by Peter Tkachev, the populist who in turn was influenced by the Jacobinism of the French Revolution. Tkachev called for an elite vanguard of revolutionaries, organised centrally, to violently seize power and create an authoritarian regime. As Service points out, in his own writings Lenin was fairly coy in admitting this, citing instead Marx, Engels and Plekhanov. Nevertheless, the influence is apparent in Lenin’s conception of how a revolutionary party should be organised, and what its relationship to the working class ought to be.

Service maintains a good balance between describing Lenin’s thought and preserving the overall chronological structure of the book. His accounts of polemics with other Russian (and foreign) Social Democrats, such as Plekhanov, Trotsky and Kautsky are useful and instructive. Perhaps one of the best instances of this is Service’s description of the disputations within the Bolshevik party over their actual task once they had come to power: that of building state capitalism. Lenin had been clear about this even before the October Revolution. Service points out how Lenin saw the essence of “socialism” as “account keeping and supervision”. One could also add the utter suppression of the working class and peasantry.

The major limitation of this volume, as with the vast majority of historical biography, is that it can fall into the “Great Man” theory of history. The importance of one person is inflated, thereby simplifying and sometimes distorting a description of the historical process. This is occasionally a problem with the present volume. Unlike Services earlier, 1979 classic study The Bolshevik Party in Revolution, 1917-23: A Study In Organisational Change, the Lenin biography tends to focus on the major personalities within the Russian Social Democratic movement. As a result, the description of pre-revolutionary feuds and disputes are superb, but the portions of the book describing events after Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917 are flat, not putting the thoughts of individuals into any wider context. A working knowledge of the general background is therefore advantageous for the reader to glean the most from the book.

Having said that, such a wider context probably wasn’t in Service’s remit. This biography sets itself the tasks of humanising Lenin and freeing the story of his life from demonisers and sycophants. There can be no doubt it succeeds in this brilliantly. The best one-volume account of Lenin’s life the present reviewer has ever come across, and well worth any reader investigating further.

Robert Worden

The Life of Uncle Joe (2005)

Book Review from the June 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stalin: a biography by Robert Service. (528 pages. Macmillan. £25,  ISBN 033726278) 

Service deliberately, and bravely, tries to dig for the true story of Stalin’s life beyond the hagiography or demonography that usually represents him.

He presents the case that Stalin, or Joseph Dzughashvili, or Soso, or Koba — as he was variously known — was a central character in the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik party. He was keen acolyte of Lenin, a hardman — he organised the campaign of bank robbery and extortion in the Caucasian areas of the Tsarist empire at Lenin’s behest, even when the latter promised to cease such activities. He edited Pravda, was on the Bolshevik central committee and was Lenin’s close collaborator on the ‘National Question’. 

He was imprisoned several times, and though taciturn with fellow prisoners, he took his beatings at the hands of prison guards with equanimity. During the civil war, he commanded the Red Army on the south fronts, where he proved to be a ruthless if not effective commander.

So, hardly the grey man Trotsky liked to pretend him to be — but Trotsky could hardly criticise Stalin for brutality, when he was as nearly as ruthless. In fact, Service makes a good case that Stalin rose to power as part of a stop-Trotsky faction.

Stalin was able to present himself as the acme of Leninist orthodoxy, and possibly — and Service does make this case — believed he really was creating some form of socialism in the Soviet Union. Socialists — unlike Leninists — have no need to shy away from this fact. Our argument never was that Stalin was a bad man, a monster (although, obviously, he was) but that he was acting upon a false and dangerous theory — that a band of dedicated leaders could force the world to socialism.

Service makes clear that much of Stalin’s apparent paranoia was based on the simple fact that he and his fellows had risen to power suddenly and almost out of nowhere against the might of Tsarism. He believed, apparently, that a similar cabal could unseat him — what comes round goes around.

His callousness was relentless, ranging from bullying subordinates at informal parties, to personally poring over the list of names and faces of victims of his terror. Service alleges a desire to be at the centre of things, to assert himself that grew from childhood and was fostered by his membership of the Bolshevik party. As he notes, Stalin was among the few genuinely working class members of the inner sanctum of the party — which goes to show that having genuine workers in charge doesn’t make that much difference.

In his desk, when he died, were some keepsakes — a letter from Bukharin begging to know why he Stalin wanted to murder him when he was already politically dead, and a letter from Tito, threatening to try and assassinate him if he didn’t stop trying to bump the Yugoslav dictator off — as Service notes, one gangster to another. Even his intimate moments were blood-soaked and ruthless. This is a tidy account of the life of a utopian who thought that through ruthless will alone he could shape the world. As in some parts of his former empire, his statues are being resurrected and his reputation repaired, it also serves as a timely warning against leaders past, present and future.

Pik Smeet

The prophet debunked (2010)

Book Review from the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trotsky. A Biography. By Robert Service. Macmillan. 624pp.

Were Trotsky alive today, he would have the editors of this book shot. It is riddled with irritating errors. Round brackets close square; names change spelling; weird sentences like the idea that Russian radicals “took the bits of Marxism they disliked and discarded the rest” slip through; and apparently Oslo and St. Petersburg lie on the same longitude, 59 degrees North. Macmillan should be ashamed to have allowed this slapdash product into print.

This would not matter except that the representatives of Trotsky on Earth have launched a flurry of chaff to attack this biography of their idol. Forensic hair splitting has been their method, and finding faults, such as that Natalya Sederova (Trotsky’s partner) died in 1962 rather than 1960 as the book claims. This is, of course, a distraction tactic. Hardly any of their reviews deal with the meat of the book.

Peter Taaffe, leader of the “Socialist Party” (formerly Militant) performs the usual Trotskyist miracle of simultaneously denying and justifying the repressive tactics and terror of the Bolsheviks. David North of the World Socialist (sic) website cavils over trivialities, and even manages to accuse Service of anti-Semitism. North also has the lack of originality to describe Service’s text as part of the ‘School of historical falsification’ echoing his hero’s riposte to Stalin.

They don’t address Trotsky’s ordering the decimation of a battalion for cowardice. Or Lenin signing an order for 100-1000 leading citizens of a city to be hanged. The book notes Trotsky’s willingness to use authoritarian methods, and suggests that prior to 1917 he never spelled out what he meant by dictatorship, but that during the crisis leading to the Bolshevik coup d’Etat, he would speak in praise of the guillotine that made opponents of the revolution “shorter by a head”.

Service depicts, with accounts from witnesses, Trotsky as an aloof and self-centred man, who lacked political judgement to help him keep friends close. He alienated many by his manner. He was never, contrary to the received wisdom and dogma of the sects, an organised Marxist. He was a non-aligned member of the Russian Social Democratic Party, who spent the years up to the Great War trying to unify the factions but never joining any. Even when he joined the Bolsheviks, it was as a loose cannon, and that would be part of his undoing.

Service attributes Trotsky’s failure to become the leader of the revolution after Lenin to a lack of will on his part – and claims that any obstacles were surmountable. He suggests that Trotsky was not planning, nor might have been able, to use his position of head of the Red Army to seize power: but that the fear of this motivated his opponents.

What sticks in the craw of the Trots, and threatens the entire ideological edifice of their movement, is Service’s contention that Trotsky did not in policy terms differ from Stalin, and that he had indeed consciously presided over the introduction of a series of show trials of opponents like the ones used by Stalin against Trotsky’s allies. Further, he examines Trotsky’s late claim that the “backwardness” of Russian development was to blame for the “degeneration” of the revolution. In that case, enquires Service, was not the whole enterprise, including all its shed blood, a forlorn waste of time.

Despite the claims of the acolytes, this is not an entire hatchet job, Service freely acknowledges that Trotsky was a great writer and orator, and a brave man in his own personal right. It is, though, a biography, as much a literary form as an historical one, and judgement plays an important part. Service gives his opinion, and is openly critical of Bolshevism and the reader can make up their own mind.

Pik Smeet