Comment on Wheatcroft

®®¼®®®®®Ó®EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, Vol. 51, No. 8, 1999, 1479±1483Comment on WheatcroftROBERT CONQUEST1Wheatcroft seems to regard his recent intemperate, and not very coherent, piece asa massive refutation of Conquest. Massive, yesÐ if you include repeated imputationsof motive and other matters the serious reader will have skipped But refutation,no.But rst, Wheatcroft's claim to superior accuracy, responsibility and generalscholarly virtue could do with some puncturing. Two counterexamples:(a) He charges me (p. 320) with, disgracefully and typically, speaking of myacademic opponents as `Neo-Stalinist revisionists' (in an English-language inter-view with Katrina Vanden Houvel published in Moscow News). What I actuallysaid was, of Western writers who had implied that there was not much of a terror,`A few were Stalinists or semi-StalinistsÐ for remember, there are admirers ofStalin outside the USSR too! But most seem simply to have found Stalin's actions2beyond the capacity of their parochial imaginations'. This casts a certain doubton his capacity to quote documents.(b) Wheatcroft also rebukes me when, having cited an estimate of the numbersdisenfranchised which the researcher responsible later withdrew, I pointed outthat this did not affect my argument. When rst citing these gures, I had writtenthat I was `not quali ed to comment', that I had `not checked' the `sources'quoted, that they seemed too large, but that `if valid' they might be of ...