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Geoffrey C. 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.
In 1992, Roberts took up an academic position at the University College Cork, where he has taught history and international relations. He worked in the archives of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs from November 1996. He became a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1997. He was a visiting scholar at the Kennan Institute in Washington, D.C. in 2001 and again in 2007, as well as a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellow in 2004–2005.
He was promoted to Professor of History at UCC in 2005. 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. He served as Head of UCC's School of History from 2009 to 2014, then as Deputy Registrar and Dean of Graduate Studies in 2017–2018.
A commentator on history and current affairs, Roberts has been a regular speaker in Britain, Ireland, Russia and the United States, and a contributor to the History News Service. Between 2011 and 2014 he was an opinion writer for the Irish Examiner. He has appeared on radio and television and has acted as an historical consultant for documentary series such as Simon Berthon's Warlords, which was broadcast in 2005 on Channel 4.
In 2013, the Society for Military History awarded the Distinguished Book Award to his Stalin's General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (2012), a work which Jonathan Yardley for The Washington Post described as "what is likely to stand for some time as the most comprehensive biography of Georgy Zhukov."
In 2015, Roberts' Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953, which was first published in 2006 by Yale University Press, was apparently banned from Sorbonne University because of alleged neutrality issue after an online petition asked the university to stock the French version of the work. Roberts was surprised by it, and commented, "It's never happened before. It's a work of scholarship. It has some very strong opinions, not everyone agrees with it, but to characterise it the way they've characterised it is completely wrong.... There can be no reason for an academic library to prohibit the purchase of Les Guerres de Staline, except political prejudice."
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."
Roberts said he was "a great admirer of much of [Timothy Snyder]]'s work" and commended Bloodlands for telling "an important part of the story, but I don't see it as the whole picture." Expressing disagreement with Snyder's equating Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union, Roberts commented, "It's a pity Snyder's work has become associated with the recent revival of Cold War ideological polemics in which Hitler and Stalin and the Soviet and Nazi systems are depicted as being equivalent and as bad as each other."
Roberts also wrote: "Without him the efforts of the Communist party, the people, the armed forces and their generals would have been considerably less effective."
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."
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