This is, by my count, Robert Service’s 12th book that touches on the Russian Revolution, either substantively or tangentially. So far, we’ve had a biographical triptych on Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin; a trilogy on the last; two broad surveys of modern Russia; a monograph on the last tsar and another on the Bolsheviks; and a general account for students. By now, he could churn out another history on autopilot. He is, thankfully, too clever for that. What we have here is the work of a lifetime, a reflective volume alert to local and geopolitics, art and culture, high society and the affairs of ordinary people. If he had served up a larger slice of history, encompassing the consolidation of Stalinism rather than ending the narrative with Lenin’s demise, he could have claimed with some justification to have written the definitive word on the revolution.
Over the years, Service has acquired a reputation for impeccable, almost smug, even-handedness. This has strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, he offers none of the flights of literary imagination that make, say, Isaac Deutscher’s triple-decker life of Trotsky such a gripping yarn. By contrast, Service is a one-man anti-hagiography factory. A Stakhanovite among stylists, he desultorily, Englishly, files away episode after episode. On the positive side, he has little time for the starving cannibals and sozzled soldiers of Orlando Figes’s revolutionary tragedy.But why a new history of the revolution? Service invokes the need to survey the scene “from below”. Accordingly, he has mined a dozen diaries for contemporaneous reactions to the events. These can have a rather predictable quality. We meet, for instance, a man recoiling in horror at the “lawlessness” unleashed by the Bolsheviks; perhaps the nationalisation of his dacha had something to do with his response. Similarly, we encounter a British nurse having to endure middle-class hardships: “Domestic servants have ceased to exist.” Or take the entrepreneurial, conservative farmer, who decided that the Bolsheviks were a “disgusting party”.
