It was a pleasure to listen such expert of Soviet Russia history. I'm from East Europa and i remember comunism and it's good that people still work on that extremally important topic. Very nice pronounce of russian surnames. 👏👏👏

Well, THIS man has better understanding of how the things were (and still are) carried out in Russia then anyone eose in the West.

I may not agree with a lot of what he says about Stalin, but it's pretty obvious that he cares more about facts and being accurate to history than just trying to push a narrative, unlike Robert Conquest. It's funny that saying that Stalin didn't control the entire USSR is considered "Stalin apologia."

Oh what a treat to listen to this. The interviewer one of the best ive heare

26:13 "Stalin and the boys", just so happens to be the name of my band.

Fascinated how this people can take so many classes in different topics, in german neoliberal university education, you take a major an are supposed to stick with it and do it rather fast.

I find going into a totally disorganised archive to be really exciting. It as though one is about to discover something really interesting - in an organised archive is just like being in a library. I have only been in a totally disorganised one once - and that was in 1992 and I doubt it will happen again.

I took a modern 20th century European History class on 1989 at UC Riverside, and J. Arch Getty was my professor. I have extremely fond memories of him and this course!

This guy's PhD thesis was of great help when I wrote my Russian Studies B.A. Dissertation at Keele. Great revisionist overview of forced collectivisation.

People will still be talking about the great J.V. Stalin for centuries to come!!

11:45 That comment there, makes him a traitor and “Stalinist”, defenders of Steven Kotkin have called him that to me because of those kind of unbiased factual statements

"She pushed me to write well." That's an academic in-joke.

Thank you for posting this

I had Riasanovsky and Rieber, too. Great.

Im really confused with him talking about the Road to Terror book. I thought he wrote that a good while after the opening of the archives? Is he confusing it with Origins of the Great Purges, which he wrote before the opening of the archives?

This does not explain why Stalin ordered the purge of the overwhelming majority of the delegates to the party Congress of 1934( I can't remember what number it was). This fact was a major theme of Khruschev's "secret speech" of 1656) to a later party congress in which hw denounced Stalin and his "cult of personality," essentially destroying his reputation within Russia. Some sources also report a massive purge of party members who had joined the party in the period 1974-to `924 (:enon's death). In this early stage of the 1930s purge, the dismissed ex-party members were not killed, but the priveleges that they enjoyed as party members were taken from them. The rationale was those purged were "opportunists" who only joined the party because it was in their interest to do so, not because they were sincere Bolsheviks.

6:00 on Conquest 36:15 Stalin only allowed this in '37-'38, he generally felt widespread purges created chaos and disorganization in the nation, yezhov became a drunk blabber mouth which pissed Stalin off

You actually believe that Stalin didn't kill Kirov?😂😂😂

I wanted to know when this video was shot (I'm interested in history, so dates are important to me) So I look at the opening titles and see roman numerals. Why is this? Everyone knows these things are a pain in the butt to read. I have the strong suspicion it is snobbery.

Toast was born in the bread queues.

Sounds like a real researcher. My takeaway from research was that Stalin was a great manipulator. Caused endless suffering to the Soviet people.

Getty would do better to just stick to relating information he finds than making conclusions about what all that data means. He has carried his naiveté with him through the years. It appears he has never really delved into understanding the psychology of people who lived through the experience of Soviet totalitarian rule and particularly the Stalinist terror. The major arguments that he pushed in his 1985 book remain far from having panned out. His biggest error was approaching the study of Soviet politics from a western perspective and believing that people in that system acted and thought as those in the West. He even believed that documents and transcripts were done and kept as they would be in the rest of the world and was surprised that there were huge chunks missing from protocols (not transcripts) of party gatherings and that protocols were tailored for different audiences and different times. He admits he had imagined fairly well defined groups in the Party leadership - this at a time when people were arrested and condemned simply by the company they kept. Getty doesn't appreciate what it meant to live in those times when nothing was certain, including what is "fact," and the only way to survive was to beat the guy who may be getting ready to point his finger at you as a state traitor and enemy. The fear was even greater among communist cadres than that which permeated Nazi structures. Can one imagine being punished with a 10-year sentence in concentration camps just for telling an anti-soviet joke to one's spouse or child? Getty never gave value to the testimonies of those who experienced communism on their own skin and even Soviet newspapers (propaganda rags) were awarded greater credence from Getty than actual bona fide witnesses to communist atrocities. Getty's compulsion to reduce Stalin's role in the Great Terror is really puzzling. Does he imagine that the purges were just an opportunity for groups at various levels to fight one another? Archival material proves that Stalin had a habit of coming up with numerical figures of enemies and then having his underlings meet those quotas. The arrest and execution of each and every victim was explained using the newest enemy terminology and accusations that came from atop. Worst of all the focus of Getty's research is mostly limited to what was happening with the leadership and ranks of the Communist Party. Purges of everyone else, from the intelligentsia, clergy, pre-revolutionary activists, cooperative leaders, farmers were taking place constantly while Stalin was in power having just picked up at where Lenin left off. Though the entire party leadership was behind those endless arrests, executions, deportations, it's crazy to consider that those repressions were not organized and orchestrated just like it's crazy to hold that the 1932-22 Famine in Ukraine, Kuban region and certain Volga regions was also not engineered by Stalin and his henchmen. Getty belongs to a whole group of Sovietologists who with their strange need to salvage and humanize the agents of communist genocides and mass terror have made a huge disservice to Truth and History.

Is this man part of the rise of the Far -Left on college campuses throughout the USA ?