Part 1

Ah yes, Robert Service, focal point of lots of controversy and yet still somehow getting glowing press reviews for the most part.

To put it very succinctly: Your impression that Service is biased is completely spot on, at least for both his books Comrades as well as for his more recent biography of Trotsky.

Seumas Milne writing for The Guardian, characterized Comrades as

firmly in this neoconservative mould. From the first few pages, we are left in no doubt that, wherever it raised its head, communism was a bizarre and horrific historical detour. Unequivocally siding with the "totalitarian school" of Soviet historiography against the more even-handed "revisionists", his central argument is that, whatever the local variants, communists necessarily relied on dictatorship because of their lack of support, hare-brained socialist economics and reliance on an ideology, Marxism, that was inherently violent and totalitarian.

In what often reads more like a polemic than a historical account, Service offers a relentlessly cartoonish portrayal both of communist politics and theory. Marx, Lenin and their followers had promised a "perfect society" and a "workers' paradise", Service claims absurdly. Revolution is explained as a "bacillus", communist leaders as variously "dotty", "foolish", "lunatic" and "gangsters" who were guilty of "rank hypocrisy". The accumulation of factual errors also scarcely inspires confidence: Allende's 1970s government was not "communist-led"; the Malayan communists fought the British not the Dutch in the 1950s; Antonio Gramsci didn't die in prison; and Germany's Spartacist uprising didn't take place in 1918.

Milne further accuses Service of delivering a polemic rather than a scholarly historical account. Dismissing the murder of one million Indonesian communists in a western-backed coup in 1965 in one sentence, Service, he writes "shows his colours with studied disdain for such policies as job security, narrow wage differentials and "discriminating in favour of the poorer citizens"."

Thought one of the biggest shortcomings of Service' book Milne points to is that Service completely overlooks and/or dismisses that communism as an ideology and a political movement did indeed have millions of supporters at one point or another in history. Now, whether one agrees with it or not is not the point when it comes to historical inquiry and so, the failure to distill and answer why an ideology, that as Service is so eager to point out, did take hold in Russia under extreme circumstance and then was exported to a third of the world to result in a number of dictatorial regimes did nonetheless attract millions of people to its cause, is the real shortcoming of the book. Writing about Communism as a project solely pursued and designed by a small number of conspiratorial elites wanting to establish a dictatorship for themselves while ignoring to explore the factors that made it so attractive to literally millions of followers not only demonstrates bias but also failure as a historian.

"Ok", I already hear some say, "Milne is hardly the best person to pass judgement here. After all, he is in the left-wing of the British labor party and recently became an important appointment of Jeremy Corbyn in the party." And while that is true (and does not diminish his criticism, especially when factual errors are concerned), Service has also been heavily criticized by people who are less easily dismissed as biased, foremost Bertrand M. Patenaude, fellow at the Hoover Institution and Stanford.

In 2009 Robert Service published Trotsky, a biography, which is attempting to do exactly what the title says. Generally well received by the press, it already started off with a misstatement of fact. Service claimed in his preface this was the first full length biography of Trotsky from someone outside the Soviet Union who is not a Trotskyite. A claim that is patently untrue and inarguably false. A fact, none of his reviewers seemed initially to have picked up on.

Patenaude, an expert on Soviet Russia and former teacher of international security at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California (i.e. not a Trotskyite) had also published a book on Trotsky, called Trotsky. Downfall of a Revolutionary in 2009 and so was awarded the dubious honor of writing a review of Service' book for the American Historical Review in 2011; a review about which one contributor at Inside Higher Education said "will earn a place in the annals of the scholarly take-down."

Patenaude eviscerates Service biography of Trotsky for its numerous factual errors and questionable interpretations. He sets out writing:

It appears that he set out thoroughly to discredit Trotsky as a historical figure and as a human being. His Trotsky is not merely arrogant, self-righteous, and self-absorbed; he is a mass murderer and a terrorist, a cold and heartless son, husband, father, and comrade, and an intellectual lightweight who falsified the record of his role in the Russian Revolution and whose writings have continued to fool generations of readers—a hoax perpetuated by his hagiographer Isaac Deutscher. In his eagerness to cut Trotsky down, Service commits numerous distortions of the historical record and outright errors of fact to the point that the intellectual integrity of the whole enterprise is open to question.

Service main source and main exhibit in his efforts to paint a picture of Trotsky as dark and terrible as possible is Trotsky's autobiography My life, which he wrote in 1930 and of which Service claims to have access to a first draft significantly different from the published version. Enter Patenaude:

Yet neither here nor anywhere else is Service able to provide a single example of a significant discrepancy between the published memoir and the draft. In fact, in his depiction of Trotsky's youth, Service relies almost entirely on the published version of My Life, not on earlier drafts. Service accuses Trotsky the memoirist of being “selective, evasive and self-aggrandizing” (p. xxi) (as if most memoirs do not fit this description), yet he reads other memoirs completely uncritically (for example, those of Gregory A. Ziv and Clare Sheridan) when they show Trotsky in an unfavorable light.

And it doesn't stop there. Concerning factual errors, Patenaude writes:

I have counted more than four dozen. Service mixes up the names of Trotsky's sons, misidentifies the largest political group in the first Duma in 1906, botches the name of the Austrian archduke assassinated at Sarajevo, misrepresents the circumstances of Nicholas II's abdication, gets backward Trotsky's position in 1940 on the United States' entry into World War II, and gives the wrong year of death of Trotsky's widow. Service's book is completely unreliable as a reference. At times the errors are jaw-dropping. Service believes that Bertram Wolfe was one of Trotsky's “acolytes” living with him in Mexico (pp. 441, 473), that André Breton was a “surrealist painter” whose “pictures exhibited sympathy with the plight of the working people” (p. 453), and that Mikhail Gorbachev rehabilitated Trotsky in 1988, when in fact Trotsky was never posthumously rehabilitated by the Soviet government.