Are the Robert Service biographies of Stalin + Lenin + Trotsky good historical works?
They seem to have a lot of negative reviews. Is this because it makes lots of criticisms against the leaders which offends the Communist sympathisers likely to read such works? Or are they simply bad biographies?
>>8072286
One-sided neocon stuff apparently
>>8072292
I get the feeling the neocon accusation comes from commie sympathisers.
>>8072334
"Commie sympathizers" didn't like Bush and Cheney either. You reading their bios next?
They were authoritarians, and I don't approve of them in the least, but I'll be damned if I'm going to read some Foxnewz talking head's books on the topic. Maybe the negative reviews are right.
>>8072286
Believe me, these books are trash. I'm a communist myself, but I can take balanced critiques of communism - try Archie Brown's Rise and Fall of Communism for one example - Service, however, is an awful historian whose chief priority is painting an ideological portrait of his targets, not reporting factually. You'd be better served by Wikipedia than one of his shitty books.
>>8073715
>You'd be better served by Wikipedia
Woah man take it easy, don't say anything you'll regret
Service is just a bad historian, beyond his personal biases and attacks that occur throughout all these books.
For Lenin:
-Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography (Krausz)
-Lenin (Lih)
Stalin:
-Stalin, Vol. 1: Paradoxes of Power (Kotkin)
Trotsky:
-Prophet Armed, Prophet Unarmed, Prophet Outcast (Deutscher)
