John Archibald Getty III (November 30, 1950 – May 19, 2025) was an American historian and professor at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who specialized in thehistory of Russia and thehistory of the Soviet Union.
Getty was born inLouisiana and grew up inOklahoma. He received hisBachelor of Artsdegree from theUniversity of Pennsylvania in 1972 and hisPh.D. fromBoston College in 1979. Getty was a professor at theUniversity of California, Riverside, before he moved to UCLA.
Getty was aJohn Simon Guggenheim Fellow and a research fellow of theRussian State University for the Humanities (Moscow) and was senior fellow of theHarriman Institute (Columbia University) and the Davis Center (Harvard University). He was senior visiting scholar at theRussian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.[1]
Getty died on May 19, 2025, at the age of 74.[2]
AcademicSovietology afterWorld War II and during theCold War was dominated by the "totalitarian model" of theSoviet Union,[3] stressing the absolute nature ofJoseph Stalin's power.[4] The "revisionist school" beginning in the 1960s focused on relatively autonomous institutions which might influence policy at the higher level.[5] Matt Lenoe described the "revisionist school" as representing those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong. They tended to be interested in social history and to argue that the Communist Party leadership had had to adjust to social forces."[6] Getty was one of a number of "revisionist school" historians who challenged the traditional approach to Soviet history, as outlined by political scientistCarl Joachim Friedrich, which stated that the Soviet Union was atotalitarian system, with thepersonality cult and almost unlimited powers of the "great leader" such as Stalin.[7][8]
InOrigins of the Great Purges, a book published in 1985, Getty said that theSoviet political system was not completely controlled from the center and that Stalin only responded to political events as they arose.[7] The book was a challenge to works byRobert Conquest and part of the debates between the "totalitarian model" and "revisionist school" of the Soviet Union. In an appendix to the book, Getty also questioned the previously published findings that Stalin organized himself the murder ofSergey Kirov to justify his campaign ofGreat 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."[6][11] During the debates in the 1980s, the use ofémigré sources and the insistence on Stalin's engineering of Kirov's murder became embedded in the two sides' position. In a review of Conquest's work on theSoviet famine of 1932–1933, especiallyThe Harvest of Sorrow, Getty wrote that while Stalin and theSoviet Politburo were primarily responsible, "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 a 1987 review for theLondon 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 theAmerican 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."[12] In the sameLRB article, Getty gave his interpretation of the events,[nb 2] which is in line with the "revisionist school" bottom-up approach.[9]
With thedissolution of the Soviet Union and the release of theSoviet archives, some of the heat has gone out of the debate,[7] as "totalitarian model" and "revisionist" school merged into "postrevisionism" as a synthesis.[9] Getty was one of the most active Western historians researching the archives along withLynne Viola.[8] A 1993 study of archival data by Gettyet al. showed that a total of 1,053,829 people died in theGulag from 1934 to 1953.[13] In a 1993 study,[14] Getty wrote that the opening of the Soviet archives has vindicated the lower estimates put forth by the "revisionist school" scholars.[15] His analysis of Stalin as powerful but having at least in his early rule, to work within an array of competing interests and powers, a cruel but ordinary mortal being who was not omnipotent nor a master planner, has been described as a representation of thebanal evil described byHannah Arendt.[9]
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.
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.
Tucker's work stressed the absolute nature of Stalin's power, an assumption which was increasingly challenged by later revisionist historians. In hisOrigins 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.
... 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.
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.
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, evenTLS andThe Independent, have contained erroneous journalistic articles that should not be cited in respectable academic articles.
