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.
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