J. Arch Getty

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 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.

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.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history/ge...