The Scarecrow of J.V. Stalin

The process of globalization in the second half of the twentieth century led to the emergence of a new trend in historical science, the so-called “new historians”, who try to find out what real social phenomena stand behind the discord of various historical schools expressing one or another purely national or narrow class point of view. One of them, J. Arch Getty, began revising the prevailing ideas about the history of the USSR and the United States and their confrontation throughout the twentieth century. He was admitted to work in the archives of Russia. In 2002, “Komsomolskaya Pravda” for a month and a half published a series of articles under the general title “The Scarecrow of Stalin”, dedicated to the fact that J. Arch Getty “excavated” in Russian archives according to theme of dark places in the history of the USSR. The excavations allow one to draw conclusions, quite far from the generally accepted historical narrative, on such themes as the so called “Great Purge“ of 1937, as we