Professor Robert John Service is a British historian specializing in Russia. He is also a writer, communicator, professor at St Antony's College, Oxford and a member of the British Academy. He was one of the first historians to access Soviet archives after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Service studied at the University of Cambridge, where he devoted himself to the study of Russian and Ancient Greek. He then went on to the Universities of Essex and Leningrad for postgraduate studies and taught at Keele of the London School of Slavonic Studies before establishing himself as a professor at the University of Oxford in 1998.

Siglo XXI has published the two monumental biographies he has written on Soviet leaders: Lenin (second edition, April 2010) and Stalin (2004).

Many critics in Service have praised his dispassionate analyzes of Russia's past and his lack of ideological fervor.

This, combined with his research skills and literary style, has made Robert Service one of Russia's most popular historians, at the level of specialists such as Robert Conquest, Orlando Figes, Richard Pipes, and Simon Sebag Montefiore.

Other works of his are: Russia, experiment with a people (Siglo XXI, 2005) and Comrades. Brief history of communism (Ediciones B, 2009).