1920–2012
○ Natural causes
Historian who interpreted the Kronstadt uprising as the last stand of Soviet democracy
One day a discussion had to be broken off at 11am; when Getzler returned five hours later, he resumed exactly where he had left off, without a single lubricating word of linkage: 'And seventhly, Lenin…'
Born in Berlin to a Polish-Jewish immigrant family, Getzler was deported by the Nazis to Poland, resettled in a Siberian gold-mining settlement by Soviet authorities, and eventually emigrated to Australia, where he earned a history degree and taught at the University of Adelaide. His 1967 biography of Yuli Martov recovered the Menshevik leader as a serious democratic alternative to Lenin, and his Kronstadt 1917–1921 (1983) used fleet muster rolls to show that 93.9% of the Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol crews had enlisted before 1918, proving the rebels were veteran revolutionaries and not peasant conscripts in White-Guard disguise. He became professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1971, insisted that individual and group choices shaped Soviet history, and in his later years marched against Israeli settlement policy into his eighties.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1938Deported with family to Poland by the Nazis
- 1941Resettled by Soviet authorities to a Siberian gold-mining settlement
- ~1945Emigrated to Australia
- ~1950sEarned history degree at University of Adelaide; later gained tenured post
- ~1960sResearch at Hoover Institution archives, Stanford University
- 1967Published Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat
- 1971Became professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- 1983Published Kronstadt 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy
- 2002Published Nikolai Sukhanov: Chronicler of the Russian Revolution
Related historical events
The Sukhanov Biography and the Study of the Menshevik Trial
Getzler's final major monograph was Nikolai Sukhanov: Chronicler of the Russian Revolution (2002). Like his Martov biography, it drew a figure back into historical writing who had no advocates in the USSR or abroad and had been largely forgotten in the West. Sukhanov, born Nikolai Nikolaevich Gimmer, was a revolutionary, agrarian economist and journalist who began in the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, became a founding member of the Petrograd Soviet's executive committee in 1917, and joined Martov's Menshevik-Internationalists. Getzler traced how he developed his critique of Soviet power and the Provisional Government in the pages of Novaia zhizn', and how authoritative his record was considered to be - Lenin engaged critically with his memoir even from his sickbed.
The core of the book is its analysis of the so-called Menshevik trial of March 1931. Examining the published reports and preliminary investigations, Getzler asked why Sukhanov confessed in open court, slandering himself and his colleagues, and suggested that threats to family members may have played an important part. Sukhanov was one of the linchpins of the prosecution's case, as innocent Sunday evening tea parties were recast as secret meetings of a vast counterrevolutionary conspiracy. What Getzler exposed was intellectual courage and political compromise mingled in one person: his courageous protest against tighter pre-publication censorship at the end of 1928 sat alongside his publication that same year of a play that gave a Bolshevized and historically inaccurate account of 1917. He presented Sukhanov as a brilliant but in many respects tragic figure, the roots of the tragedy lying largely in his inconsistency - he could not hold to his Menshevik principles like Martov, nor abandon them completely like his former comrade Vyshinsky.
The project connects to Getzler's own concerns. What he sought to recover was not an object of moral condemnation but the trajectory of an individual forced into choices amid repression and self-negation. Sukhanov was arrested in 1930, and after the trial suffered Siberian exile and imprisonment before being prosecuted again in 1937 on a fabricated charge of spying for Nazi Germany; he was executed in 1940. He was rehabilitated after Stalin's death, and in 1992 a committee declared all accusations against him baseless.