J. Arch Getty

J. Arch Getty is the author of The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks 1932-39. He is a professor of history at UCLA.

Letter

Starving the Ukraine

22 January 1987

SIR: Robert Conquest portrays recent writers on the Stalin period as a ‘gaggle of “revisionists" ’ and makes the most silly and manifestly false claims about their work (Letters, 7 May). Neither I nor any other scholar has ever written that Cold War-era works or the writings of émigrés are invalid as a genre. Neither I nor any other scholar has ever denied that large-scale terror took place...

Whose person is he? ‘Practising Stalinism’

Sheila Fitzpatrick, 20 March 2014

Arch Getty​ spent a great many hours in Soviet libraries and archives (presumably during the 1980s), trying to understand Stalinism, studying its institutions and formal procedures, reading...

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Rancorous Luminaries

R.W. Davies, 28 April 1994

Western historians have been struggling for decades to get into the archives of the Stalin period. In the early Eighties, before Gorbachev took office, we were granted very limited access, but...

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Stalin’s Purges

John Barber, 17 October 1985

Nothing in the history of modern revolution illustrates so vividly the contrast between the ideals of a revolution’s makers and the catastrophes it may be fated to endure as do the Great...

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