What type of Historian is Robert Service?
I would say that he was a post-revisionist. Revisionist historians were a product of the 1960s & ’70s and tried to analyse history in new and challenging ways, such as by claiming that Stalinism wasn’t totalitarianism, Hitler wasn’t so bad after all and that the US was responsible for all the world’s ills. By the 1980s this method of deliberately provocative, and occasionally very interesting, examining historical issues had fallen out of favour. Robert Service began to publish in the late 1990s, just as many Soviet archives were opened up, so his works are based up genuine Soviet material – most revisionist historians’ works were based upon speculation, dissident accounts or on (incorrect) official Soviet publications.
