Robert Service Quotes

born 1947 United Kingdom

Robert John Service FBA (born 29 October 1947) is a British post-revisionist historian, academic, and author who has written extensively on the history of the Soviet Union, particularly the period from the October Revolution in 1917 to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. He was until 2013 a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford, a fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

United Kingdom
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Random Robert Service quote

3 quotes

Freedom could not be begged for: it had to be won.

Trotsky: A Biography (2009)

The victor powers in the Great War had irresistible force at their disposal if only they could muster the will to deploy it. But they increasingly lacked that will.

Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West (2011)

Parvus denied that universal suffrage was an end in itself since the middle class would always had ways to manipulate the electoral system. Freedom could not be begged for: it had to be won. The bureaucracy and officer corps had to be eliminated. What was needed, in fact, was not just an uprising as demanded by the Bolsheviks but a commitment to a struggle to 'make the revolution permanent'.

Trotsky: A Biography (2009)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Service (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.