A month ago, John Archibald Getty passed away—a historian whose research became a turning point in the study of the Stalinist era. Getty was a transformative figure in the study of Soviet history. At a time when Cold War orthodoxy painted the Stalinist regime in static and monolithic terms, Getty challenged prevailing narratives by returning to the archives. His pioneering use of newly accessible Soviet documents in the late 1980s and 1990s helped establish a “revisionist” school of thought—one that emphasized institutional complexity, internal politics, and the role of ideology, bureaucracy, and contingency in shaping Soviet governance.
Getty’s most influential works, including
Origins of the Great Purges and
Practicing Stalinism, redefined scholarly understanding of repression, party dynamics, and the everyday functioning of Stalinist institutions. He showed that the Soviet state was not simply a top-down dictatorship, but a system riven with internal conflicts, bureaucratic competition, and unintended consequences.
Beyond his publications, Getty’s mentorship and teaching shaped generations of historians. He was known not only for his analytical clarity and archival mastery but also for his intellectual generosity. His legacy lives on in the many scholars he trained, the methodological rigor he championed, and the questions he taught us to ask about power, ideology, and historical narrative.
Today,
The Bridge would like to pay tribute to this outstanding researcher and his academic legacy. Among Getty’s most well-known works are
Origins of the Great Purges (1985),
Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s 'Iron Fist' (2008, co-authored with Oleg Naumov), and
Practicing Stalinism (2013). Our team closely examined Getty’s key works and identified the primary archival sources and collections he worked with.
GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation)
Fund R-9401 — People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs / Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR A key source on the history of the NKVD and MVD of the USSR from 1934 to 1991. Includes orders, reports, materials on special operations, camps, and personnel issues. Of particular value are documents from the times of Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria, which provide insight into the mechanisms of repression, the logic of terror, and the interaction between the center and regions. The fund reflects organizational changes in the department and is an important resource for studying Stalinist governance and camp economics.
Fund R-5446 — Council of People’s Commissars / Council of Ministers of the USSR The archive of the all-Union government from 1923 to 1991. Includes decrees, directives, draft laws, reports of commissariats, documents on budget, foreign policy, defense, and social issues. Through this fund, one can trace how vertical power structures were built, coordination with the republics, and how key decisions were formalized. A vital source for understanding the logic of Soviet state governance.
RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History)
Fund 17 — Central Committee of the VKP(b)/CPSU The main fund for the party history of the USSR from 1917 until the collapse of the Union. Includes minutes of plenums, Politburo meetings, directives, resolutions, internal correspondence, and reports. This fund was the foundation for Getty’s work showing the party not as a single-leader vertical but as a complex apparatus of competition, disputes, and self-destruction. It contains 165 inventories and about 800,000 files.
Fund 589 — Party Control Commission at the Central Committee of the VKP(b)/CPSU Documents on party investigations and internal discipline from 1920 to 1986. Includes transcripts of meetings, purge protocols, expulsion cases, appeals, and discussions of ideological deviations. Materials from the 1930s — the time of active purges — are particularly important. This fund reveals how the party exercised "self-control" without the NKVD, through its own disciplinary mechanisms.
RGB (Russian State Library / "Leninka")
One of the main sites for working with printed Soviet sources — newspapers, journals, statistical collections, internal publicistics. Here, one can track official rhetoric, party campaigns, and media coverage of repressions. Especially important are the archives of
Pravda,
Izvestia,
Bolshevik,
Party Life, and others. These sources show how the party conveyed its messages and how ideology shifted in the public eye.
In addition to the well-known Moscow archives, we want to highlight valuable yet still under-researched archival resources in St. Petersburg. These collections offer access to unique materials on the local implementation of repressive policies, day-to-day party life, and regional institutional memory.
TsGAIPD SPb (Central State Archive of Historical and Political Documents of St. Petersburg)
Fund R-24 — Leningrad Regional Committee of the VKP(b) Documents of the Smolny District Committee of the CPSU, covering almost the entire Soviet period (late 1920s–1980s). Show how party decisions were implemented "on the ground": purges, reprimands, personnel appointments. Includes orders, acts, reports, protocols — the internal documentation of the district level. A valuable source for researching the everyday operations of the lower levels of the party apparatus and local repressive practices.
Fund R-25 — Leningrad City Committee of the CPSU (1931–1991) Covers the entire mature Soviet period, including Stalinist repressions, postwar mobilization, late stagnation, and perestroika. Contains orders, reports, meeting minutes, correspondence. Through this fund, one can study how the leadership of a major city regulated ideological work, economic matters, and personnel policy while adapting to signals from the center.
Fund R-4000 — Leningrad Institute of Historical and Political Studies A collection of unique memoirs, transcripts, and diaries gathered from war participants, organization workers, and city residents. Materials reflect perceptions of war, patriotic sentiments, and the party’s assessment of civic loyalty. Particularly valuable are the documents from the Great Patriotic War period, recorded by the party institute — as a form of institutionalized memory and ideological framing of “proper” civic behavior.