Blood on the Snow

Robert Service’s Blood on the Snow is his masterwork, the product of decades of thought about Russia’s past. A terrific book about a terrifying subject by the best historian of Russia working today. – Michael Burleigh, author of Day of the Assassins and The Third Reich: A New History Blood on the Snow crowns Robert Service’s four decades of work on the Russian Revolution and its perpetrators. * The Literary Review * This authoritative, detailed account shows how Lenin won control of Russia and caused untold misery … Service takes a methodical approach, carefully outlining the sequence of events and always emphasising the importance of simple luck. In contrast to other authors, he lets ordinary people have their voice, through an assortment of otherwise neglected diaries. * The Times * Robert Service’s Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914–1924 brings a new vibrancy to the history of the Revolution … With its short chapters and choppy sentences, and a title and jacket design that are more airport novel than academic tome, Service’s history reads like a thriller and is all the better for it. * TLS *

Robert Service is a Fellow of the British Academy and of St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has written several books, including the highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography, Stalin: A Biography and Comrades: A History of World Communism, as well as many other books on Russia’s past and present. Trotsky: A Biography was awarded the 2009 Duff Cooper Prize. He lives in London.