Geoffrey Roberts

Geoffrey Charles Roberts (born 1952) is a British historian specialising in Soviet diplomatic and military history of World War II. He is an emeritus professor of modern history at University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland.

Early life and education Roberts was born into a working class family in Deptford, south London, in 1952. He completed four O-level examinations at the Addey and Stanhope Grammar School by 1968 and left to work as a clerk at the Greater London Council while attending evening classes. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain's Young Communist League in 1969 and worked with Alastair Montague "Monty" Johnstone (1928–2007) in its Trotskyism Study Group. During the 1970s, he studied international relations at the North Staffordshire Polytechnic (switching from sociology after his first year), where he was influenced by the historian of Poland John Coutouvidis. He pursued graduate research in this field at the London School of Economics under the supervision of Geoffrey Stern. In 1987, on the advice of Stern, he decided to publish his postgraduate research as a book before submitting it as a thesis, He was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University in the same year and a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo in 2008.

In 2015, Roberts' Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953,

Roberts was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in March 2016.

About the Soviet Union, of which he was a critic in his youth, he commented "I retain the liberal and democratic ethos that informed my critique of Soviet authoritarianism." Roberts stated that it was "responsible for some of the most epic achievements and most gross misdeeds of our age" and said he had "no difficulty in joining the condemnation of the Soviet system's violence, terror and repression."

In a 1996 article for The Journal of Modern History, Haslam criticized Roberts for relying too heavily on edited Soviet archival documents and for going too far in his conclusions, positing that this made his accounts somewhat one sided and by no means telling a full story.

In a review about the same work for The National Interest, the historian Andrew Bacevich described it as "a model of scholarship" but criticized the depiction of Stalin "as great statesman and man of peace" and posited that Roberts was being overly sympathetic towards Stalin, taking the word of the Soviet leadership uncritically in his writings, presenting a biased view, and significantly undermining the usefulness of his scholarship. Roberts described Stalin as "the dictator who defeated Hitler and helped save the world for democracy."

Published works See also the 1990 edition via Internet Archive.