Robert Service

Songs of a Sourdough by Robert Service, defined a place and time like only a truly great poet can. Set in the Yukon during the great Klondike gold rush, this collection of poems is full of the wild characters, the freezing snow storms and the vast staggering beauty Artic wilderness. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing...

When Robert W. Service was transferred to the Whitehorse Branch of the Canadian Bank of Commerce in the Yukon Territory in 1904, six years after the Klondike Gold Rush, his career as a world-famous poet would soon begin. Inspired by the beauty of the Yukon wilderness, Service would write some of the most expressive poetry of the age depicting the trials and tribulations of the Yukon gold mining life. "Best Tales of the Yukon" collects together forty-seven...

Russia has long played an influential part in its world of Islam, and not all the dimensions are as widely understood, as they ought to be. In Russia and Its Islamic World, Robert Service examines Russia's interactions with Islam at home and around the globe and pinpoints the tsarist and Soviet legacy, current complications, and future possibilities. The author details how the Russian encounter with Islam was close and problematic long before the...

The Cold War had seemed like a permanent fixture in global politics, and until its denouement, no Western or Soviet politician had foreseen that an epoch defined by games of irreconcilable one-upmanship between the world's most heavily armed superpowers would end in their lifetimes. Under the long, forbidding shadow of the Cold War, even the smallest miscalculation from either side could result in catastrophe. Everything changed in March 1985, when...

Trotsky is perhaps the most intriguing and, given his prominence, the most understudied of the Soviet revolutionaries. Using new archival sources, Robert Service offers new insights. He discusses Trotsky's fractious relations with the leaders he was trying to unify; his attempt to disguise his political closeness to Stalin; and his role in the early 1920s as the progenitor of political and cultural Stalinism. Trotsky evinced a surprisingly glacial...