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In your review of Getty's 1999 book about Stalin, The Road to Terror, you do not challenge Getty's figure of 600,000 executions under Stalin in 1937-38, which is based on evidence Getty found in Soviet archives. We need to be careful about assuming that everything "from the archives" is true. Firstly, look who controlled the archives since Stalin's death. Khruschev built his anti-Stalin line by distributing documents from the Stalin era among senior figures in the Party which "proved" Stalin's alleged crimes, presumably these documents were then archived. Can we assume all these documents were authentic?
Gorbachov and Yeltsin also released documents from the archives "strategically," to undermine Soviet "conservatives" who had some patriotic nostalgia for Stalin (e.g. he released a document that "proved" that Stalin ordered the Katyn massacre). You might also want to note that "a pioneer agreement on exchanging archival information and microfilms and on organizing microfilming was signed on April 17, 1992, between the State Committee for Archival Affairs under the government of the Russian Federation (now the Federal Archival Service of Russia - Rosarkhiv), the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University," according to the Hoover Institution itself.
Finally, the Washington Times published evidence that a document found in the Russian archives in 1993 regarding Vietnam MIAs was a forgery, probably planted for political reasons. Susan Katz Keating discusses this in her book Prisoners of Hope I don't have full details on this but it is another reason to treat Soviet archival evidence with some scepticism. I have not heard of any tests being made on the authenticity of document found in the Soviet archives, other than the MIA one.
MIM replies: The point about Getty is his reasoning process and willingness to read the government documents. Previous books failed to attempt to understand their subject matter by actually reading what Stalin said for example. The USSR from 1924 to 1938 was not just a huge country full of newly born babies unable to speak, in which case we might have to gather what was going on with the babies by circumstantial processes and that is all. The party itself gave considerable guidance about what it was doing and what it meant by what it was doing. Too often scholars contradict the Soviet party's explanation in foolish ways and do not bother to justify themselves.
Willingness to read the Soviet party makes a big difference in journalism and history. There is a perverse notion afoot that one can study a subject without understanding what it is about. Much material appears to be gathering circumstantial evidence surrounding whatever agenda an outside scholar might take.
There were countless forgeries related to the dictatorship of the proletariat because informers sent in patently untrue information hoping to ensnare victims. Stalin made use of such informers. The point about spying and justice administration is not to be shocked in that regard. It is an ongoing problem for our communist movement how to engage the participation of the public, to increase the democracy for the exploited a thousand-fold as Lenin said.
Perhaps you meant that the Vietnam document ended up in the archive after the fact. You don't say, but the point is also whether an archivist can determine whether it should have been in the archive or would have been given the rules.
There is no justifying waiting for perfect explanations from a perfect archive. At any given time, there is only better and worse information on any subject. The contrary view is historical idealism, awaiting a Jesus figure, very possibly to slay the anti- Christ, Stalin. Such a process of reasoning and handling history leads to "truthiness" in the words of a recent comedian Stephen Colbert, the production of what people want to be true for their own underlying Christian reasons.
For example, just today we see as the lead story and paragraph for the New York Times the following: "The decline of Fidel Castro, who turned 80 on Sunday and appeared in photographs for the first time since his unspecified intestinal surgery last month was supposed to be a kind of second Cuban revolution. The notion, put forward by Cuba specialists for years, was that the entire system hung on one man." ("Surprising Experts, Cuba Stays Calm with Castro on Sidelines," by Ginger Thompson, New York Times Aug142006, p. 1) That's quite an admission by the New York Times representing bourgeois journalism.
Among other things, Getty realizes that Stalin did not persynally know or execute 750,000 people, (or tens of millions of people depending on which supposed historian one reads) so Getty tries to figure out what motivations people had for getting involved in executions. What's important there is not whether this or that informer accusation is true, but Getty's reasoning process, which is still Liberal and slightly nihilist but less so than previous work.
So there are two kinds of gullibility. The only kind of gullibility that the West has criticized is that something is true because Stalin said so. There is another kind of gullibility stemming from Christian cultural needs, and that is that the archive of party and government documents is worthless, because everything was the work of the anti-Christ who according to the Bible can take any form it wants at any time. With such a view of course it is unimportant that Stalin did not come up with lists of whom to execute and the information had to come from below, somewhere else. As anti-Christ, Stalin merely embodied himself in worthless, merely mortal local officials and citizens who then served as his willing fools. This train of reasoning has gone so far that anti-communist chic is calling the intellectual giant and Spanish Civil War veteran Ernest Hemingway a naive fool used by all-potent Stalin.
What happens among people of the West is that a few strong-minded propagandists lead the public into a pleasant truthiness, because that public is afraid that if it reads that evil Stalin, Soviet party and government that it will be taken over by the anti-Christ and be unable to come up with any critical outlook on Stalin. So maybe Ronald Reagan was right that "a Marxist is someone who has read Marx." We need only reject Reagan's part about knowing what it is without reading it, something that many in the left-wing of parasitism echo Reagan on.
By way of criticism of the knowledge production process, MIM also indicated in the review that Getty could also be the latest round of baiting for further information. There is a cycle to the academic process in which scholars alternately bait and flatter those who they aim to uncover further information from. We cannot await all such infinite processes to hold some knowledge ourselves. Belief that we can is "waiting for Judgment Day" masked as a critical outlook.
MIM has read and spoken to many doctoral degree-holders who reason in an essentially Christian process. Getty's book makes a greater effort to steer between the gullibilities than previous writers attempting to justify Western military and spying budgets.