J. Arch Getty

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John Archibald Getty III (born November 30, 1950)[1] is an American historian and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who specializes in the history of Russia and the history of the Soviet Union.

Life and career

Getty was born in Louisiana and grew up in Oklahoma. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and his Ph.D. from Boston College in 1979. Getty was a professor at the University of California, Riverside, before he moved to UCLA.

Getty is a

John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and a research fellow of the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow) and has been senior fellow of the Harriman Institute (Columbia University) and the Davis Center (Harvard University). He was senior visiting scholar at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.[2]

Research, ideas, and debates

Academic

personality cult and almost unlimited powers of the "great leader" such as Stalin.[7][8]

In Origins of Great Purges, a book published in 1985, Getty said that the

Sergey Kirov to justify his campaign of Great Purge.[6] Getty saw Stalin's rule as dictatorial but not totalitarian because the latter demanded an administrative and technological effectiveness that did not exist.[9][nb 1]

The "totalitarian model" historians objected to the "revisionist school" of historians such as Getty as apologetics for Stalin and accused them of downplaying the terror. Lenoe responded that "Getty has not denied Stalin's ultimate responsibility for the Terror, nor is he an admirer of Stalin."

Soviet Politburo played a major role, but "there is plenty of blame to go around. It must be shared by the tens of thousands of activists and officials who carried out the policy and by the peasants who chose to slaughter animals, burn fields, and boycott cultivation in protest."[12]

In an 1987 review for the London Review of Books (LRB) about Conquest's work, Getty wrote: "Conquest's hypothesis, sources and evidence are not new. Indeed, he himself first put forward his view two years ago in a work sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. The intentional famine story, however, has been an article of faith for Ukrainian émigrés in the West since the Cold War. ... Conquest's book will thus give a certain academic credibility to a theory which has not been generally accepted by non-partisan scholars outside the circles of exiled nationalities. In today's conservative political climate, with its 'evil empire' discourse, I am sure that the book will be very popular."[13] In the same LRB article, Getty gave his interpretation of the events,[nb 2] which is in line with the "revisionist school" bottom-up approach.[9]

With the

banal evil described by Hannah Arendt.[9]

Published works

Books

Articles

Notes

  1. 1936 Soviet Constitution, Getty wrote: "Many who lauded Stalin's Soviet Union as the most democratic country on earth lived to regret their words. After all, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 was adopted on the eve of the Great Terror of the late 1930s; the 'thoroughly democratic' elections to the first Supreme Soviet permitted only uncontested candidates and took place at the height of the savage violence in 1937. The civil rights, personal freedoms, and democratic forms promised in the Stalin constitution were trampled almost immediately and remained dead letters until long after Stalin's death."[10]
  2. ^ Getty wrote: "Stalin gave his backing to radicals in the Party who saw the mixed economy of the Twenties as an unwarranted concession to capitalism. These leftists, for whom Stalin was spokesman and leader, argued that the free market in grain confronted the state with an unpredictable, inefficient and expensive food supply. ... These radical activists, who became the shock troops of the voluntarist 'Stalin Revolution' which swept the Soviet Union in the Thirties, were concentrated in working-class and youth groups. ... The collectivisation of agriculture from 1929 to about 1934 proceeded in several fitful campaigns characterised by confusion, lurches to left and right, and the substitution of enthusiasm, exhortation and violence for careful planning. Hard-line officials and volunteers forced reluctant peasants into improvised collective farms. Peasants resisted by slaughtering animals and refusing to plant, harvest or market grain. Neither side would give way. By 1934 the Stalinists had won, at least insofar as the collective farm system was permanently established, but they had paid a painful price: catastrophic livestock losses, social dislocation and, in some places, famine. Millions of people died from starvation, deportation and violence."[13]

References

  1. ^ Date information sourced from Library of Congress Authorities data, via corresponding WorldCat Identities linked authority file (LAF).
  2. ^ "Faculty page". History.ucla.edu. University of Los Angeles, California. Retrieved 27 August 2016.
  3. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1
    . Academic Sovietology, a child of the early Cold War, was dominated by the 'totalitarian model' of Soviet politics. Until the 1960s it was almost impossible to advance any other interpretation, in the USA at least.
  4. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1
    . In 1953, Carl Friedrich characterised totalitarian systems in terms of five points: an official ideology, control of weapons and of media, use of terror, and a single mass party, 'usually under a single leader'. There was of course an assumption that the leader was critical to the workings of totalitarianism: at the apex of a monolithic, centralised, and hierarchical system, it was he who issued the orders which were fulfilled unquestioningly by his subordinates.
  5. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1
    . Tucker's work stressed the absolute nature of Stalin's power, an assumption which was increasingly challenged by later revisionist historians. In his Origins of the Great Purges, Arch Getty argued that the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin's leadership consisted to a considerable extent in responding, on an ad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose. Getty's work was influenced by political science of the 1960s onwards, which, in a critique of the totalitarian model, began to consider the possibility that relatively autonomous bureaucratic institutions might have had some influence on policy-making at the highest level.
  6. ^
    S2CID 142829949
    .
  7. ^
    ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1
    .
  8. ^
    ISSN 1468-2303
    . ... the Western scholars who in the 1990s and 2000s were most active in scouring the new archives for data on Soviet repression were revisionists (always 'archive rats') such as Arch Getty and Lynne Viola.
  9. ^
    ISBN 9789197748728
    .
  10. JSTOR 2500596
    .
  11. ISBN 978-1-893554-72-6
    .
  12. ^ Coplon, Jeff (12 January 1988). "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust". Village Voice. Retrieved 30 November 2020 – via Montclair State University.
  13. ^ a b Getty, J. Arch (22 January 1987). "Starving the Ukraine". The London Review of Books. 9 (2): 7–8. Retrieved 24 September 2015.
  14. JSTOR 2166597
    . Retrieved 30 November 2020.
  15. JSTOR 2166597
    . The long-awaited archival evidence on repression in the period of the Great Purges shows that levels of arrests, political prisoners, executions, and general camp populations tend to confirm the orders of magnitude indicated by those labeled as 'revisionists' and mocked by those proposing high estimates.
  16. doi:10.1080/09668139999056
    . For decades, many historians counted Stalin' s victims in 'tens of millions', which was a figure supported by Solzhenitsyn. Since the collapse of the USSR, the lower estimates of the scale of the camps have been vindicated. The arguments about excess mortality are far more complex than normally believed. R. Conquest, The Great Terror: A Re-assessment (London, 1992) does not really get to grips with the new data and continues to present an exaggerated picture of the repression. The view of the 'revisionists' has been largely substantiated (J. Arch Getty & R. T. Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge, 1993)). The popular press, even TLS and The Independent, have contained erroneous journalistic articles that should not be cited in respectable academic articles.

External links
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