J. Arch Getty
Professor
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J. Arch Getty Professor |
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Fields of Interest: Modern Russian History;
history of the Soviet Communist Party; Stalinism; Russian archives.
Born in Louisiana and reared in Oklahoma, Arch Getty nevertheless received B.A. (University of Pennsylvania) and Ph.D. (Boston College) degrees in 1972 and 1979. He specializes in the Stalin period and the history of the Soviet Communist Party. Before coming to UCLA on the first day of the current millennium, he taught at UC Riverside, where he won the Distinguished Teaching Award and suffered as History Department Chair.
His books and articles on the Stalin period of Russian history have been published in the US, England, France, Germany, Japan and Russia. In 1992, his dream came true and he was able to use formerly secret police archives to publish exact data on the number of Stalin's victims. (Everyone has their own dreams...) He now spends several months each year in Moscow working in the political archives of the former Soviet Communist Party, eating cabbages, watching coups, engaging in currency speculation, and shivering in unheated reading rooms. Getty is a Research Fellow of the Russian State Humanities University (Moscow), and has been Senior Fellow of the Harriman Institute (Columbia University), and the Davis Center (Harvard University), as well as Senior Visiting Scholar at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He is currently a co-investigator with the Stalin Era Research and Archives Project of the University of Toronto on a project to analyze and publish the secret reports from the Soviet secret police to the Politburo on the moods of the population during the Stalin period. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the International Research and Exchanges Board, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. He is founder and Director of Praxis International, a non-profit foundation that facilitates research travel to Russia, and arranges archival access there for western scholars. In 1993-96, 2003, and 2005 he organized and directed the Moscow Study Center of the University of California Education Abroad Program. Professor Getty eagerly awaits the final collapses of socialism, capitalism, and all other political systems. In the meantime, when he is not playing with his three beagles, he is completing a biography of Stalin's chief of the secret police during the Great Purges of the 1930s: Stalin's Iron Fist: the Life and Times of N. I. Ezhov, forthcoming, Yale University Press, 2007. Some selected publications: Books: "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. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, (with Oleg V. Naumov),Yale University Press, 1999. 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), ed., with V. P. Kozlov, Moscow, Blagovest, 1993. Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1985. Ninth printing, 1996. Articles (last 10 years): "Stalin as Prime Minister:
Power and the Politburo," in James Harris and Sarah Davies, eds., Stalin: A New History, Cambridge
University Press, 2006. "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 EtudesSlaves, 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. |
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His research seeks to understand how the greatest
experiment of the 20th century, led by a movement that grew out of
rational, enlightened, egalitarian, and democratic traditions resulted in
dictatorship and the deaths of millions of its own people. His approach is
social, political, and structural and he insists that Soviet history can
be studied with the same methodologies we use on other times, places, and
systems. It is a sad sign of the politicized Cold War origins and
primitive development of Soviet studies that such concentration on factors
other than Stalin's personality have been considered radical.