1950–2025
○ Natural causes
A revisionist historian of Soviet political history
He likened the archives to laboratories where he could try to explain the unimaginable.
J. Arch Getty was an American historian of Soviet political history and Stalinism who taught and conducted research at UCLA. In Origins of the Great Purges (1985), he challenged the picture of Stalinism as the product of seamless central control, emphasizing weak party organization, local autonomy, and conflict within the leadership. That approach became a major strand of the Western revisionist debate surrounding Khrushchev’s revelations and the interpretation of Stalinism, although it did not absolve Stalin or the party leadership of responsibility for terror. After Soviet archives opened, he and other scholars used new records to reassess the scale of repression and the workings of state violence.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1972B.A., University of Pennsylvania
- 1979Ph.D., Boston College
- 1985–1986Professor of history, University of California, Riverside; Distinguished Teacher of the Year
- 1985Published Origins of the Great Purges
- 1993Co-edited Stalinist Terror and co-compiled The Central Party Archive: A Research Guide
- 1999Co-authored The Road to Terror with Oleg Naumov
- 2015–2016119th UCLA Faculty Research Lecturer
- 2024Co-edited Reflections on Stalinism
Related historical events
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeHistorian of the Great PurgeIn his 1985 book, he analysed Stalinism and the origins of the Great Purges.
- 1956.02The Twentieth Party Congress and the Secret SpeechRevisionist assessor of the secret speechIn 1985 he argued that Khrushchev's revelations were 'almost entirely self-serving,' shaping the Western revisionist view.
Archival research and documentary editions
After the Soviet archives opened, Getty was among the Western historians most active in working with the new records. He spent several months each year in Moscow, working in the political archives of the former Soviet Communist Party, and he left his own account of the hours spent in unheated reading rooms because post-Soviet governments had sharply cut funding for archives. In 1993 he and Oleg Naumov produced a research guide to the Central Party Archive, and with Roberta Manning he co-edited Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, a collection that gathered new approaches to the study of repression.
That same year, writing with Gabor Rittersporn and Viktor Zemskov, he published a study that put the mortality statistics of the penal system on archival footing for the first time. It reported that 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag between 1934 and 1953, and Getty argued that the opening of the archives had vindicated the lower estimates put forward by the revisionist school. The authors also cautioned that the archival categories themselves should not be taken at face value.
The Road to Terror, written with Naumov in 1999, assembled party documents from the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History and framed the unfolding of the purges through conflict within the leadership and the self-destruction of the party apparatus. The work belongs to the shift in which the confrontation between the totalitarian model and the revisionist school gave way to a postrevisionist synthesis. In the debate over the scale of repression and the responsibility of the party leadership, Getty continued to question the account of terror as the product of a single central plan, without denying Stalin's ultimate responsibility.