Geoffrey Roberts is a British historian of the Second World War.

Geoffrey Roberts was born in Deptford

Deptford

Deptford is a district of south London, England, located on the south bank of the River Thames. It is named after a ford of the River Ravensbourne, and from the mid 16th century to the late 19th was home to Deptford Dockyard, the first of the Royal Navy Dockyards.Deptford and the docks are...

, south London in 1952. His father worked as a labourer at the local power station and his mother as a cleaner and tea lady. A pupil of Addey and Stanhope

Addey and Stanhope School

Addey and Stanhope School is a voluntary-aided, co-educational secondary school, located in Lewisham, London, UK. A former grammar school, with origins dating to 1606, Addey and Stanhope became a specialist science and technology school in 2006. The school is also part of the Crossways Federation,...

 Grammar School he left aged 16 and started his working life as a clerk with the Greater London Council

Greater London Council

The Greater London Council was the top-tier local government administrative body for Greater London from 1965 to 1986. It replaced the earlier London County Council which had covered a much smaller area...

. In the 1970s he was an International Relations undergraduate at North Staffordshire Polytechnic and postgraduate research student at the London School of Economics

London School of Economics

The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...

. In the 1980s he worked in the Education Department of NALGO, the public sector trade union.

He returned to academic life in the 1990s following the publication of his acclaimed first book The Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact with Hitler, 1989.

Many books and articles followed:

• The Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact with Hitler, 1989.
• The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War, 1995
• The Soviet Union in World Politics, 1945-1991, 1998
• Victory at Stalingrad: The Battle That Changed History , 2002.
• Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953, Yale University Press
  Yale University Press
  Yale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. It became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but remains financially and operationally autonomous....
  
  , 2006 .

Professor Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and teaches History and International Relations at University College Cork, Ireland. He has won many academic awards and prizes, including a Fulbright Scholarship to Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 and a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship.
He is a regular commentator on history and current affairs for British and Irish newspapers and a contributor to the History News Service, which syndicates articles to American media outlets. He has many radio and TV appearances to his credit and has acted as historical consultant for documentary series such as Simon Berthon’s highly praised Warlords, broadcast in 2005.

He specializes in Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 diplomatic and military history of the Second World War. He is a professor of modern history

Modern history

Modern history, or the modern era, describes the historical timeline after the Middle Ages. Modern history can be further broken down into the early modern period and the late modern period after the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution...

 at University College Cork in Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

 and is currently head of the School of History at UCC.

Roberts has come under serious criticism from Andrew Bacevich

Andrew Bacevich

Andrew J. Bacevich, Sr. is a professor of international relations at Boston University and a retired career officer in the United States Army...

, who have made a serious case that Roberts is overly sympathetic towards Stalin, taking the word of the Soviet leadership uncritically in his writings, thus presenting a biased view and critically undermining the usefulness of his scholarship. According to Jonathan Haslam, the fact that Roberts relies too heavily
on edited Soviet archival documents and goes too far in his conclusions make his accounts somewhat one sided and by no means telling a full story.