Robert Service Books
Robert Service is a British historian and political commentator specializing in Russian history. He is a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford and a senior fellow at St Antony’s College.
Known for: Russia: Experiment With a People: From Gorbachev to Putin
Books by Robert Service
Russia: Experiment With a People: From Gorbachev to Putin
This book offers a comprehensive analysis of Russia’s transformation from the late Soviet period through the early years of Vladimir Putin’s rule. Historian Robert Service examines the political, economic, and social experiments that shaped post-Soviet Russia, exploring how reform efforts, nationalism, and power struggles defined the nation’s trajectory after the collapse of the USSR.
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Gorbachev’s Reforms
When Gorbachev stepped into power in 1985, he confronted a Soviet Union exhausted by stagnation, rigid bureaucracy, and global competition it could no longer sustain. His reform pillars—perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness)—were not conceived as dismantling tools but as mechanisms of r...
From Russia: Experiment With a People: From Gorbachev to Putin
Collapse of the USSR
By the early 1990s, cracks within the federation widened irreversibly. Economic malfunction, the unraveling of party discipline, and centrifugal nationalism converged. The Soviet Union, despite its immense coercive apparatus, could no longer command obedience from its peripheries. I portray the coll...
From Russia: Experiment With a People: From Gorbachev to Putin
About Robert Service
Robert Service is a British historian and political commentator specializing in Russian history. He is a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford and a senior fellow at St Antony’s College. Service is known for his authoritative biographies of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, as well as h...
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Robert Service is a British historian and political commentator specializing in Russian history. He is a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford and a senior fellow at St Antony’s College. Service is known for his authoritative biographies of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, as well as h...
Robert Service is a British historian and political commentator specializing in Russian history. He is a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford and a senior fellow at St Antony’s College. Service is known for his authoritative biographies of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, as well as his works on Soviet and post-Soviet politics.
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Robert Service is a British historian and political commentator specializing in Russian history. He is a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford and a senior fellow at St Antony’s College.
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