J. Arch Getty
Biography
J. Arch Getty Obituary
Like Sabatini’s Scaramouche, Arch Getty “was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” He possessed a quick wit and wry sense of humor; he did not suffer fools lightly. Although he encountered many, his strong social skills and graceful demeanor often masked his opinions. They rightfully found him polite and engaging. He appreciated the irony. He was also a very generous person who opened his home and heart to many. He was always eager to engage in discussions of the USSR in the 1930s with colleagues and graduate students to whom he was a generous mentor. As a man who enjoyed his indulgences, he preferred to have such discussions over dinner or drinks, including coffee, which he himself roasted. But that was his preferred daylight beverage. Whatever the setting or time, conversations with Arch were stimulating and despite the topic, always fun.
Arch was one of the key figures in revising the previously dominant narratives and tropes associated with the so-called totalitarian approach to what made the Soviet Union under Stalin tick. He never sought to discover what went wrong with the Soviet adventure and what were its prospects. Rather, he was interested in Soviet realities as they happened to be, and he explored them in the best tradition of “sine ira et studio.”
As a political historian, Arch more than ably represented the arrival of that discipline in a field previously dominated by political science. In Origins of the Great Purges (1985), his careful primary research led him to reject the image of a tightly organized party controlled from the center by an omnipotent leader. He did so by bringing to bear the Smolensk Archive and other then little-used sources to demonstrate that the party over which Stalin presided was often badly organized, inefficient and faction-ridden, reacting to social processes as much as instigating them. He thereby expanded the scope of historical understanding beyond the center to address center-periphery relations and, to cite some of his favorite expressions, the “little screws” as well as the “big cheese.” He did so in prose that was always precise and to the point but could be laced with tongue-in-cheek irony and witty allusions.
Subsequent books included Stalinist Terror, co-edited with his former advisor Roberta Manning (1993), The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, with Oleg Naumov (1999), and Practicing Stalinism: Boyars, Bolsheviks, and the Persistence of Political Traditions (2014). Among myriad articles he published, special mention should be made of “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years,” American Historical Review (Oct. 1993) which Arch wrote with Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov and which remains the definitive work on the numbers of arrests, incarcerations and deaths resulting from Stalinist state repression. All these works took advantage of his extraordinary access to the formerly secret Communist Party and police archives. Access to such rich sources started with scholarly relations with Soviet historians that began with The Soviet Data Bank (constructed with Bill Chase), which sought to create a public political and biographical archive. When the USSR collapsed, those personal relations made possible the creation of the Russian Publications Series, created by Arch, Jeff Burds, Bill Chase, and Greg Freeze, which used federal and private funds, to finance the production of guides to important central archives and their international distribution. Those guides remain the most complete listing of those archives’ holdings. Arch himself helped to compile and edit the Kratkii Putevoditel’, the invaluable guide to collections in the Central Party Archive (1993) and Lubianka-Stalinu o polozhenii v strane (1932-1934 g.g.), with A. N. Sakharov (2002). Supported by a bevy of federal institutions whose survival is now threatened, Arch in turn supported research by other scholars through his founding and directing of the non-profit Praxis International. He also organized and directed the Moscow Study Center of the University of California Education Abroad Program. These activities reflected his generosity of spirit, readiness to help fellow researchers with counsel, and sense of justice and solidarity.
Arch’s last publication was Reflections on Stalinism (2024), co-edited with Lewis Siegelbaum. In his essay on “Fear, Belief, and Stalinism,” he likened the archives where he loved to dwell to laboratories in which scientists “study the horrors of cancer, AIDS, or Alzheimer’s.” “Like my colleagues with their test tubes,” he wrote in the final sentence, “I still feel the need to try and explain the unimaginable.”
William J. Chase, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh, wchase@pitt.edu
Gábor T. Rittersporn, Research Director Emeritus, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris gtr@msh-paris.fr
Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History, Michigan State University siegelba@msu.edu
Publications
Books
- Practicing Stalinism: Boyars, Bolsheviks, and the Persistence of Political Traditions, Yale University Press, 2014.
- The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, Yale University Press, 1999, 2010.
- Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s “Iron Fist,” Yale University Press, 2008.
- “Soversheno sekretno:” Lubianka-Stalinu o polozhenie v strane (1932-1934 g.g.) Tom 3. [“Top Secret:” From the Lubianka to Stalin on the Situation in the Country, 1932-1934, Vol. 3] (ed., with A. N. Sakharov et.al.), Moscow, Russian Academy of Sciences, 2002.
- Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, (ed., with Roberta T. Manning), New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Kratkii Putevoditel’: Fondy i kollektsii sobrannye Tsentral’nym Partiinym Arkhivom, (The Central Party Archive: A Research Guide), Moscow, Blagovest, 1993.
- Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1985. Ninth printing, 1996.
Recent Articles
- “Controlling Repression, 1917-1937” in Laura Douds ed., The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1941, Routledge, 2019.
- “New Sources and Old Narratives: Roundtable on Soviet Famines,” Contemporary European History, 27:3, August 2018.
- “Files, Folders, and Special Folders: Stalinist Document Secrecy,” Europe-Asia Studies (formerly Soviet Studies), 69:10, December 2017.
- “The Problem of Persistence,” in Andy Willimott and Mathias Neumann, eds., Rethinking the Russian Revolution as Historical Divide, London, Routledge, 2017.
- “The Rise and Fall of a Party First Secretary: Vainov of Iaroslavl'” in James Harris, ed., The Anatomy of Terror: Political Violence under Stalin, London, Oxford University Press, 2013.
- “Pre-Election Fever: The Origins of the 1937 Mass Operations,” in James Harris, ed., The Anatomy of Terror: Political Violence under Stalin, London, Oxford University Press, 2013.
- “State Violence in the Stalin Period,” in Marcus Levitt and Tatyana Novikov, eds., Violence in Russian Literature and Culture, University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.
- “Stalin as Prime Minister: Power and the Politburo,” in James Harris and Sarah Davies, eds., Stalin: A New History, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- “The Mentality of the Bolshevik Elite in the 1930s”, in E. I. Pivovar, ed., Sotsial’naia istoriia. Trudy k V. Z. Drobizhev?, [Social History: Essays in Honor of V. Z. Drobizhev], Moscow, 2004.
- “‘A tulkapasoktol tartozkodni kell’ — Tomegterror es sztalini hatalomgyakorlas az 1930-as evek vegen,” in Tamos Krausz, ed., A sztolinizmus hetkoznapjai, Budapest, 2003.
- “‘Excesses are not permitted:’ Mass Terror Operations in the Late 1930s and Stalinist Governance,” The Russian Review, Jan. 2002.
- “Mr. Ezhov Goes to Moscow: The Rise of a Stalinist Police Chief,” in William Husband, ed., The Human Tradition in Modern Russia, New York, 2000, 157-174.
- “Samokritika Rituals in the Stalinist Central Committee, 1933-1938,” The Russian Review, January, 1999.
- “The Politics of Repression Revisited,” in Chris Ward, ed., The Stalinist Dictatorship, London, 1998.
- “Afraid of Their Shadows: The Bolshevik Recourse to Terror, 1932-1938,” in Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Neue Wege der Forschung, ed. Manfred Hildermeier and Elisabeth Mueller-Luckner, Munich, 1998.
- “Pragmatists and Puritans: The Rise and Fall of the Party Control Commission,” The Carl Beck Papers, October, 1997.
- “Russian Archives: Is the Door Half Open or Half Closed?,” Perspectives of the American Historical Association, May/June 1996.
- “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Prewar Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” (with Gabor T. Rittersporn, and V. N. Zemskov), American Historical Review, Oct. 1993. [“Les victimes de la repression pénale dans l’URSS d’avant-guerre,” (with Gabor T. Rittersporn, and V. N. Zemskov), Revue des Etudes Slaves, 65:1, 199.]
- “Commercialization of Scholarship,” Slavic Review, Spring 1993.
- “The Politics of Stalinism,” in Alec Nove, ed., The Stalin Phenomenon, London, 1993.
- “State and Society Under Stalin: Constitutions and Elections in the 1930s,” Slavic Review, Spring 1991.
- “Les bureaucrats bolcheviques et l’État stalinien,” Revue des Etudes Slaves, LXIV: 1, 1991.
