Talk:Robert Conquest/Archive 2

message: I included the section of Controversy in the Robert Conquest article. The section had no value judgment and was absolutely objective. You removed it and introduced a pedant, arrogant and baseless comment on how it was anti-Conquest. This is absolutely preposterous. The tiny section only included accurate information on how there was a controversy around his book, which is absolutely true. If there's anyone who is contributing to a bias, be it right or left wing it is you. Your comments reflect utter ignorance on the subject, while many important historians such as Arch Getty have reviewed the man's works. I will await a coherent, humble and informed response from you.
I will continue to remove badly-written rubbish from this and other articles. To say that Conquest's work is "controversial" is a stupid and banal cliche which is already made quite apparent in the article. If you have some quotes from critics of his work, then quote them. Adam 00:31, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stop contributing to the right wing bias, Adam. 

message: "Some Communists continue to deny the claims made in The Great Terror, despite their vindication by Russian and other historians following the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of the Soviet archives. In an attempt to discredit Conquest's work, communist writers accuse him of relying on "Nazi collaborators, émigrés, and the CIA," and characterize his work with British intelligence and the Foreign Office as "production of anti-Soviet propaganda." One communist critic of Conquest is Ludo Martens, whose book Another view of Stalin is available online."
:A) Not only communists dispute Conquest's claims
:B) Among those who disagree with Conquest, it is widely believed that the opening of the archives refutes Conquest, not "vindicates" him.
This paragraph also strikes me as attempting to characterize the opposition to Conquest's work as being politically based, when in fact it is based on serious historical study, with a political basis being either secondary or nonexistent (as there are many anti-communist scholars who dispute Conquest's work). Everyking 23:46, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The problem is that the leftists are right. You are mistaken. It's really quite simple. --62.255.232.1 23:49, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Ridiculous

message: In view of some of the repellent gibberish that appears above I think it appropriate to repeat here a comment I left on the Great Terror talk page.  It is as follows;
I really have to say something in response to the semi-literate nonsense-undated and unsigned-that appears above.  Conquest's work is a brilliant condemnation of the horrors of Stalinism and the moral abdication-or blindness-of a whole generation of Western intellectuals.  The only criticism I have is that he sees Stalin, perhaps, as uniquely malevolent, when Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of the Bolshevik gangsters were in every way as bad.  "One death", Stalin said, "is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic".  The truth of course, as anyone with any moral sense understands, is that a million deaths is a million tragedies.  To try to argue that a lesser figure somehow makes the crime less heinous betrays the true rotteness at the heart of all Marxist thought.
White Guard 01:44, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Challenge to Evil-Again 

message: I recently removed two of the external links:
*"In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-year-old famine feeds the right" (Article that challenges Conquest's work)
*Conquest's fascist sources (Article that challenges Conquest's sources)
User:Adam Carr put them back with the edit summary
:there can be no objection to links to external sources critical of conquest, even if we think they are dead wrong
which is quite true. What I'm worried about is that those particular links violate WP:EL, particularly the bit about avoiding web pages containing "unverified original research" (item 2 under Links normally to be avoided). I'll leave it to other editors to make this decision.
Of course, the ideal solution is to find fully acceptable WP:Reliable Sources disputing Conquest's work; I'm astonished no-one has found any. Cheers, CWC(talk) 15:33, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  External Links 

message: This article is devoid of scholarly criticism on Conquest's shoddy methods. J.Arch Getty discredited his work by showing that he uses memoirs and anecdotes instead of reliable evidence. Stephen Wheatcroft ridiculed his claims that the declassified Soviet archives have been shown to be "fraudulent'. Most importantly, this article is devoid of how his claims about the "artificial famine", "12 million deaths in the GULAG", etc have been utterly refuted. He claimed that 12 million died in the GULAG when the archives only show 1 million.
So provide some quotes and citations. Adam 03:04, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: People on this page have been lecturing me for two years now about all these historians who have refuted Conquest's work based on the Soviet archives. They have yet to provide any evidence for this contention. I have repeatedly said, if these works exist, then let's have some citations. None have been produced. Of course the opening of the archives has allowed the correction of various points in Conquest's books - although surprisingly few given the material he had access to in the 1960s. But the basic theses of The Great Terror and Harvest of Fear have never been successfully challenged. There are arguments in both directions about the number of deaths in both cases, but this is a matter of interpretation about which greater precision is probably not now possible. The central facts - that there was a state-induced famine in which millions died, followed a purge in which millions more died - stand unchallenged, and vindicated in voluminous detail by the Soviet archives. Everyking is quite wrong to say that there are "many anti-communist scholars who dispute Conquest's work," if by this he means that they dispute the basic arguments of Conquest's two major books. Who are they? What have they published? What are their arguments? 
Adam 03:28, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kiss-Ass Article 

message: *Thanks for those links, which as can be seen are the first anyone has posted in response to my request above. I'm glad we can now debate the issue rather than just trade accusations. Since Pykhalov is in Russian he is no use to me, but I will certainly read the other two. I see that the Wheatcroft article is a rejoinder to a Conquest response to an earlier Wheatcroft article. Could we have links to Wheatcroft's first article and Conquest's response?
*You refer to "Conquest's claims that the purge in 1937-38 was a premeditated plan by Stalin to inflict mass terror on the peoples of the USSR as a whole." Conquest did not say that. The Great Terror shows clearly that, as you say, "the vast majority of those affected by the purges were elite sectors of the party, state, and burreaucracy who were a clear minority of the Soviet population." But in a party-state ruled command economy, that elite, still amounted to millions of people, particularly when the cultural elite and the military elite, and all their families, are included. Adam 05:01, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Response

message: I removed the sentence stating that "Conquest is sometimes disparagingly referred to as a "mere journalist", so it is important to note that he is a professionally qualified historian, despite not having had a conventional academic career." It's unecessarily defensive. OK, it's important to note his qualifications - and we've noted them. We don't need to explain why it's important by citing unnamed critics. If there's specific criticism of Conquest (e.g. a source in which someone actually calling him a "mere journalist"), then his qualifications could be reiterated in response. MastCell 00:36, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Career 

message: The following sentence contains weasel words: "Conquest is sometimes disparagingly referred to as a "mere journalist", so it is important to note that he is a professionally qualified historian, despite not having had a conventional academic career. (Indeed, in 1994 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.)" Who exactly is it that dispagaringly refers to Conquest as a "mere journalist"? I tagged this with "citation needed", but User:Jacob Peters removed the tag with an edit summary claiming I was "blind" and that it was fully sourced. OK, fine - then please be so kind as to remove the weasel words and attribute the disparaging comment. Otherwise, it looks like a strawman and reinforces the generally less-than-encyclopedic tone of this article. Merry Christmas. MastCell 05:18, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Weasel words 

message: Your first edit to this article is to delete this:
:The book was based mainly on information which had been made public, either officially or by individuals, during the Khrushchev Thaw in the period 1956-64. It also drew on accounts by Russian and Ukrainian émigrés and exiles dating back to the 1930s, and on an analysis of official Soviet documents such as the Soviet census.
And replace it with this:
:The book was based mainly on anecdotal information by memoirists.  
This statement can only result either from ignorance or dishonesty. Either you have not read Conquest or you are deliberately misrepresenting him. In either case this edit is unacceptable, and makes all your other edits unacceptable also. So I have reverted them, and will continue to do so. 
I have Conquest's reference pages open in front of me. I select at random Chapter 7 (Assault on the Army). I see 195 references. They include articles from the Soviet press (both from the 1930s and the 1960s), Soviet works published during the Khrushchev thaw (eg, Dubinsky, Grossman), including encyclopaedias, transcripts of party congresses, statements by Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders during that time, trial records and other documents from the 1930s made public in the 1960s, statements by Soviet dissidents (particularly Yakir), and western academic works (eg Sullivant, Deutscher, Erickson). In other words Conquest used the best sources available to him at the time of writing. They are not perfect, and he doesn't claim they are. Conquest himself discusses the problem of sources in his preface. He says "Researchers in the USSR are not in a position to discover or publish the full truth. Until they can, this account must continue to do duty." He thus acknowledges the limitations of his work. But to dismiss all his sources as "anecdotal information by memoirists" is just plain untrue, indeed slanderous, and totally discredits any subsequent criticisms you have of this article. Adam 08:56, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It would appear that User:Jacob Peters has been blocked yet again, so a response may not be forthcoming. MastCell 23:31, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Attention Jacob Peters

message: I've added an external link to a good article by Christopher Hitchens in the Wall Street Journal last Sunday. It has details which probably could be added to the article — eg., the limericks. Cheers, CWC(talk) 04:48, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hitchens article 

message: Why isn't Robert Conquest mentioned to be pro-Stalinist??? I read his book Stalin: Breaker of Nations, in it he mentions his admiration for Stalin. He mentions that Stalin has killed 5 to 7 million people(this is actually inaccurate, the real number is two million), but he still considers Stalin to be a great innovator and hero of the 20th century.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.100.202.239 (talk • contribs) 19:24, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: May be worth re-reading that book. MastCell 16:05, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pro-Stalinist