Excesses Are Permitted

I met J. Arch Getty in the fall of 1997. His hair was darker then. And I still had some. I had enrolled in his Modern Russian History class at the University of California (UC), Riverside. It was one of those big lecture courses in a big lecture hall. I had become a “Marxist” in community college, so taking a class in Soviet history was a rite of passage.

Arch Getty changed my life. The Russia bug bit me because of him. Many of us in the academy have such people. I will forever regret never thanking him before he died of cancer in May 2025.

How do I commemorate this adviser, mentor, and friend? Arch played such a crucial, even parental role in my life. Should I tally his scholarly contributions? Summarize his findings? I could. But memorials are for the living. Before you is my way to process the loss.

Arch was a passionate hobbyist, and his hobbies often turned into obsessions. His love of tropical fish verged on a second doctorate. When Arch got into brewing beer, he spared no expense. The same when he started roasting coffee. He even created his own coffee brand, Augusta’s Excellent Coffee, complete with custom bags. He named it after his granddaughter. His Russian lacquer box collecting sent him on annual pilgrimages to Fedoskino, a town outside of Moscow renowned for the art. Arch curated each around his apartment with custom labels and lights highlighting them for the visitor. Having lost my own mother—a mere three weeks after Arch, in fact—I have incredible sympathy for his three children having to sift through his leftovers. But the results of Arch’s obsessions were indisputable. Some of the best beer and coffee I’ve ever had were made by Arch.

But Arch’s true obsession was Russia.

Arch became a Soviet historian by accident. He once said, “I’ve always suspected that I’m the only Russian historian to come out of Oklahoma. I’m reliably informed that that’s the case.” At first, the university was an escape route. “Like a lot of people who grow up in Oklahoma, the most important thing was to get as far away as possible as quickly as possible.”¹

He ran far from Oklahoma to the University of Pennsylvania. He dabbled at first—in finance, sociology, and religious studies. But he always liked military history “like a lot of teenage boys.” So, he enrolled in Alfred Rieber’s Soviet political history class. Then he followed with Alexander Riasanovsky’s survey of early modern Russia. That’s when the wily Russia bug bit Arch. He found his calling. And he never looked back.

In 1972, Arch went to Boston College. Hardly a top place for a PhD in Russian history. Many of his peers went to Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard. Boston gave him a full ride, which was key because his “Oklahoma father … wasn’t paying for any more useless history education.”² There he worked under Roberta Manning, who was just out of grad school herself. He met Bill Chase, his lifelong comrade, co-conspirator, and collaborator. Arch was a bit of an anomaly in Boston, Chase recalls. He wore cowboy boots in winter, which led to many slips and falls. “You know, he just had his own way.”³ Luckily, Arch had Manning. She instilled confidence that this shitkicker-clad Oklahoman might have needed to swim in academia’s deep waters. She pushed him to write well, to think well, and to think differently. “If I [had] something a little bit outside the box,” she told him, “to go ahead and say it and see what happens.”⁴

This is how Arch’s first book, the Origins of the Great Purges, was born. Origins was one of the first studies to challenge the prevailing wisdom about the Great Terror. To do so, Arch had to slay the field’s giants, principally, its reigning king, Robert Conquest.

Origins didn’t just revise Conquest’s The Great Terror. Arch took a wrecking ball to its foundation. Conquest’s reliance on memoirs, Arch charged, reduced history to hearsay, rumor, and gossip. Later, he would call this Russia’s folkloric history or oral tradition.⁵ Where Conquest saw a plot hatched by Stalin to eliminate all rivals, Arch saw zigs and zags, gaps and contradictions. And how could there be a plan? To Arch, the Soviet state and the Bolshevik Party were dysfunctional. Stalin was an overwhelmed fire chief encircled by real and imagined fires. He could see the forest burning but not the trees that served as kindling. The Stalinist method was to douse the blaze with blood regardless of outcome or cost. The Great Man Stalin had a lot of power. His hand was firmly on the spigot. But his subordinates caught in the backdraft could nudge the direction of the retardants. And many got themselves incinerated while holding the hose.

1. “Stalin’s Great Terror: An Interview with Prof. J. Arch Getty,” YouTube, https://www.you-tube.com/watch?v=JsLPtEN62Fg, at 1:10–1:17.

2. “Stalin’s Great Terror,” at 02:00.

3. “Sean Guillory and Maya Haber interview with Bill Chase,” 15 January 2026.

4. “Stalin’s Great Terror,” at 04:13–04:18.

5. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 40–41.