Geoffrey Roberts
speaker
243 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 18 Jun
Geoffrey Roberts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
the nature of Stalin's power which wasn't just about he was a dictator he was brutal he had all his coercive power at his disposal he had people shot and stuff like that his power rested on his personality and on his charm and the social capital which he parlayed into politics you see the charming Stalin in action and you can see the power he exerts it's very revealing
about the nature of the Stalinist system and Stalin's power in that system and where that power lies.
And the roots of that power, the sources of power, which is tremendous, are actually much more interesting and complex than people might think.
Well, I met Kathy through her letters, yeah?
And I'll tell the story in the book, because my first trip to the United States, September 2001, I was in Washington, D.C., working in the Library of Congress on a file of Avril Harman's papers in the Library of Congress.
And in those papers, dispersed throughout those papers in hundreds of different files,
copies of some of Kathy's letters.
So that's what I came across.
I can't remember whether or not I discovered her letters before the terror attacks or after the terror attacks.
But what I do remember is that throughout that month, I was scurrying around the Library of Congress, the Avril Harman Papers, collecting all of
Cathy's letters together, making copies of them, because I had this idea, these letters were so interesting, so captivating, fascinating, that they had to be published.
They had to be read by other people.
So that was my idea.
I was going to publish a book of these letters.
So that's September 2001.
Okay, so I returned to Ireland.
And then it occurred to me, something which hadn't occurred to me in the previous few weeks, maybe Kathy was still alive.
Because she was born in 1917, which made her early 80s, and she was alive.
So what happens was a few months later, March 2002, I actually...
traveled to New York and met Kathy.
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