Arch Getty

John Archibald "Arch" Getty III returned peacefully to the infinite on Monday, May 19, 2025. Arch was born the first of four children to Sallye Elizabeth Getty (neé Rives) and John Archibald "Jack" Getty, Jr., in Shreveport, Louisiana on November 30, 1950. He would soon be joined by brother Bill, sister Carol, and brother Jamie. The family moved to Texas briefly before settling in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1955. Arch attended Memorial High School, where he got into righteous trouble and made lifelong friends with other social misfits whose imaginations and intellects matched his own. He left Tulsa in 1968 to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he continued these pursuits in the Ivy League. In Philadelphia Arch first learned the theoretical and intellectual context for the struggles for social justice he had witnessed since childhood, and to which he became fully committed. Perhaps relatedly, he also caught the bug for studying Russian history. In the summer of 1972 Arch married Nancy (neé Kishner), the girl next door, in her parents' Tulsa home. They remained married for more than 30 years and stayed best friends for life.

Arch assembled more brilliant friends and comrades in Boston, where he spent the remainder of that decade working on his PhD at Boston College, learning how to cook Thai panang curry, deepening his love of blues guitar, and backpacking with Nancy in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. They moved to Southern California in 1980, when Arch joined the history faculty at the University of California, Riverside. Their daughter Amanda Jane Getty arrived the next spring, followed in the fall of 1984 by their son John Archibald Getty IV. As a father Arch sought to make his children's world as big as he could. They relished his comical-fantastical-historical campfire stories told on summer road trips to Yosemite and Chaco Canyon and Lost Lake. In 1993 he took the family much further afield, to post-Soviet-collapse Moscow, where Arch led the UC Education Abroad Program in Russia; it was the first of many adventurous trips abroad that would shape each member of his family uniquely. In 1996, following the death of Arch's sister Carol, he and Nancy adopted their niece Jessica Faith, making their family a fivesome. Helping his family, however he could, remained paramount.

Arch joined the history faculty at UCLA in 2000. He loved - and was ravenously, insatiably curious about - his work. As one of the first western historians to access formerly secret Communist Party and secret police archives in Russia, he was key to reshaping long-dominant "totalitarian" narratives about the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. His "revisionary" scholarship (an originally derisive label he came to wear with some pride) changed how the world understands and continues to interrogate Stalinist repression and Soviet history more broadly. He himself produced 7 books and dozens of articles and chapters on the subject; his dedication to the collective, to the collaborative nature of knowledge building, motivated the founding of the nonprofit organization Praxis International, which enabled the in-country archival research and subsequent publications of hundreds of his peers.

His colleagues esteemed the courage of his convictions as highly as they did the integrity of his scholarship. Arch abhorred abuse in the academy, and he stepped forward to call out misdeeds when in leadership at the University, when it would have been far easier to remain silent. His graduate students were uniquely supported by his generous mentorship, under which they felt safe to take intellectual risks. They were often present at Getty family gatherings -- be they in Riverside, Moscow, Sherman Oaks, or Santa Monica.

In his retirement, overlooking the Pacific, with the loving care of partner Anna Boorstin (they met in 2010), Arch continued to write. He also built an enormous saltwater reef aquarium and took up coffee roasting. To these recreational pursuits he applied the full focus of his sharp and curious mind, and he mastered them, to the wonder and benefit of his friends and family. That, really, was the whole point: to bring joy to the people he loved. He lived for laughterful evenings on his Ocean Avenue veranda, where conversation (even about Stalin's purges) was always fun, and was always punctuated by plenty of vodka toasts and zakuski.

Arch was raised Southern Baptist. He left that church when he was able to, sensing even as a child the hypocrisy of its elders when it came to the movement for Black Liberation. He nonetheless maintained that faith is what makes us human: faith, for him specifically, that there is something beyond the realm of what we can possibly understand. His was an agnostic and wonderful faith, and it twinkled in his eyes, existing at playful odds with a scientific mind so driven by questions, and so keen at synthesizing and articulating answers from fact.

Arch was preceded in death by his parents and three siblings. He is survived by his children Amanda Jane Getty (Charles Davis), John Archibald Getty IV (Shady Grove Oliver), and Jessica Faith Gibson (Daniel); his grandchildren Wiley Cooper Gibson, Arya Lilian Elizabeth Gibson, and Augusta Getty Davis; his best friend Nancy Getty, and his partner Anna Boorstin. The family thanks the team at UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center, in particular the nurses on 4SW, for their tender and loving care. A celebration of Arch's life will be held in July in Santa Monica. In lieu of flowers, Arch wished that donations be made in his honor to MSF/Doctors Without Borders.