Geoffrey Swain
speaker
127 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 14 Jul
Geoffrey Swain’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 — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Tea is you talk there, so you go there, you go there.
It was to reflect his sort of authoritative nature.
Personally, I think it's just a family name.
There's a parliamentary system in Yugoslavia up until 1929, when the king declared his own dictatorship.
And then in the middle of the 1930s, they allow a degree of parliamentary action to reemerge.
But for the whole of the interwar period, if you were a communist, you were taking a huge political risk.
Shito had written about the possibility of there being a revolution in Yugoslavia because he assumed that if there was a new war, the Soviet Union would be involved and the Soviet Union would come to help a Yugoslav revolutionary state.
He kept the country together, but equally he sowed some of the reasons why it fell apart.
when he emerges as the country's leader, he is popular.
But they weren't interested in having a free election.
They were interested in creating a single party state in which the Communist Party was the only party.
So he's a dictator, very much a dictator in the sense that he led a dictatorial party and opponents were removed fairly brutally.
One of the things lots of people say about Tito is that he had a very strange accent.
Some of his critics say that's because he was really Russian.
He wasn't really Russian, but he did have a strange accent because he spent so much time with his Slovene grandparents.
He was very proud that he had test-driven a Daimler car in 1912 or something like that.
But he was also always active in the trade unions, and that, of course, didn't always go down very well, and so he loses jobs on occasion, he gets blacklisted.
He was also a very keen dancer.
I was fantasizing earlier that maybe if we had a strictly come dancing of the dictators, Tito would be the one who would win hands down.
Serbia had been rising as an independent power from 1903, really, evolving as quite a powerful state.
Showing 101–120 of 127 · page 6 of 7
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