"The Soviet communist leadership may have magnified the prospects of 'European revolution' but it did not invent them out of nothing. Country after country to the west of Russia was experiencing disorder and discontent. Russia itself emerged under Bolshevik rule from years of civil war and foreign armed intervention. The victor powers in the Great War had irresistible force at their disposal if only they could muster the will to deploy it. But they increasingly lacked that will. The Western Allies had not had properly agreed strategic aims since at least 1917, when America joined them."
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University of Cambridge alumniUniversity of Oxford facultyNon-fiction authors from the United KingdomHistorians from the United KingdomFellows of the British Academy
Original Language: English
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Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West (2011) ch. 24
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Service_(historian)
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Robert Service (historian)
Robert John Service FBA (born 29 October 1947) is a British post-revisionist historian, academic, and author who has written extensively on the history of the Soviet Union, particularly the period from the October Revolution in 1917 to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. He was until 2013 a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford, a fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He has written biographies of Vladimir Lenin
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