Between 1986 and 1995, Service published a three-volume biography of Vladimir Lenin. He wrote several works of general history on 20th-century Russia, including A History of Twentieth-Century Russia. He published a trilogy of biographies on the three most important Bolshevik leaders: Lenin (2000), Stalin (2004), and Trotsky (2009).
His biography of Trotsky was strongly criticised by Service's Hoover Institution colleague Bertrand Mark Patenaude in a review for the American Historical Review.[2] Patenaude, reviewing Service's book alongside a rebuttal by the Trotskyist David North (In Defence of Leon Trotsky), charged Service with making dozens of factual errors, misrepresenting evidence, and "fail[ing] to examine in a serious way Trotsky's political ideas".[3] Service responded that the book's factual errors were minor and that Patenaude's own book on Trotsky presented him as a "noble martyr". The book was criticised by the German historian of communismHermann Weber, who led a campaign to prevent Suhrkamp Verlag from publishing it in Germany. Fourteen historians and sociologists signed a letter to the publishing house. The letter cited "a host of factual errors", the "repugnant connotations" of the passages in which Service deals with Trotsky's Jewish origins, implicitly accusing him of anti-Semitism, and Service's recourse to "formulas associated with Stalinist propaganda" for the purpose of discrediting Trotsky.[4][3] Suhrkamp announced in February 2012 that it would publish a German translation of Robert Service's Trotsky in July 2012.[5] The book won the Duff Cooper Prize in the publication year 2009.[1]
