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

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

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. 👏👏👏

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.

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.

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!

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

creating text is a political power

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."

Thank you for posting this

I had Riasanovsky and Rieber, too. Great.

"She pushed me to write well."

That's an academic in-joke.

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

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

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.

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?

I don't see how anyone can understand the Great Terror using the framework he suggests. It sounds like he has gotten lost in the documents of Stalin's state apparatus, and he can't think outside of it.  

Below are two examples:

#1 "COMMUNISTS DON'T LIKE STATES" - EXCEPT FOR FAKE COMMUNISTS, AKA STALINISTS

48:00 "As is well known there's the Communist Party structure and then there's the state structure. Kind of two parallel structures running all through Soviet history. What's interesting to me is that as we know the state structure largely implements and carries out what the party structure decides. Communists don't like States.  They are afraid of States. They spent their whole lives trying to overthrow one. They always put a very powerful party politician in charge of the state apparatus not because it's important but to keep it from becoming important."

Lenin, like Marx and Engels, called for the withering away of the State once the threat of counterrevolution had been defeated.

Stalin and his successors disagreed. They never suggested this because the privileges of the bureaucracy DEPENDED on control of the workers' state until they could find a way to destroy it.

As the WSWS explained in 1998
"... The program of socialism in one country provided a banner for all those elements within the bureaucracy who identified their own material interests with the development of the USSR as a powerful national state. The bureaucracy obtained its privileges through the mechanism of state ownership of the means of production. The more it became conscious of the national-state foundations of its privileges, the less willing was the bureaucracy to place these at risk in the interest of world revolution. The program of socialism in one country legitimized the subordination of the interests of the international socialist movement to the national interests of the Soviet state, as they were conceived by the bureaucracy. ... "

-------------------------------------------------------------
#2 "BODY" OF THE LEADER
50:10  "We all know that in Soviet times the politburo Bureau, the leadership, stood on top of Lenin's tomb and watched the parades go by. That was not only an interesting vantage point to watch a parade. If you think about it, they're standing on his [Lenin's] body. They're standing on his body because the body is the state and they preserved his body not just as some kind of symbol for peasants because that was the state."

Lenin never asked for this but he did ask for Stalin be REMOVED as General Secretary, in a postscript to his Dec. 1922 "testament".  

QUOTE:
Postscript: Stalin is too rude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us communists, becomes unsupportable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore, I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority – namely, more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may seem an insignificant trifle, but 1 think that from the point of view of preventing a split and from the point of view of the relation between Stalin and Trotsky which I discussed above, it is not a trifle, or it is such a trifle as may acquire a decisive significance.

January 4, 1923, Lenin
END QUOTE

In fact Lenin and Trotsky formed a bloc in 1922 to oppose the bureaucratic degeneration of the that workers' state.

Trotsky recalled the discussion later

QUOTE
Lenin summoned me to his room in the Kremlin, spoke of the terrible growth of bureaucratism… He proposed to create a special commission of the Central Committee and asked me to take active part in the work. I answered… “In the present struggle with bureaucratism… we must not forget that there is taking place… a special selection of functionaries… around certain ruling party personalities and groups… that is, the Central Committee.”

Lenin reflected, and then said: “That is, I propose a struggle with Soviet bureaucratism and you are proposing to include the bureaucratism of the Organization Bureau of the Party.”

“I suppose that’s it,” Trotsky replied.

Then Vladimir Ilyich said: “Very well, then, I propose a bloc.”

I said: “It is a pleasure to form a bloc with a good man.” [Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification, 1937]
END

QUOTED IN
Origins of the Left Opposition: Lenin’s Last Struggle, the fight against “Socialism in One Country"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKejeIWagYI
(53 mins)
------------------
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Book launch of Vadim Rogovin’s Was There an Alternative?
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The Stalinist Terror in the Comintern and its impact, with Katja Rippert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbrkbuKJjLs
(49 mins)

It's quite incredible how this comment section is filled with communists. You can just tell theyre all over the place here. Well, what can you say, truth seems to attract them.

Toast was born in the bread queues.

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.