I didn't read the book, but "Harvest of Sorrow" main thesis was that ukraininan hunger was delibarate, intentional genocide. I read conflicting claims in internet about this thesis of Robert Conquest - in Wheatcroft and Davis book this thesis is attacked as beeing unfalsifiable (which means, I assume, that he didn't renounce it), while on various quoras or rational wiki about Holodomor I see that they state that he renounced it. I know those are not really reliable sources, I tried to dig in the internet to find a statement in an interview or something similar, but I can't find it anywhere. Do you have any sources that confirm that he renounced the thesis?
Well, Wheatcroft and Davies's Years of Hunger does include this footnote on this issue:
In correspondence Dr Conquest has stated that it is not his opinion that ‘Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine.No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put “Soviet interest” other than feeding the starving first – thus consciously abetting it’ (September 2003).
To the best of my knowledge, Conquest did not disavow this correspondence. Furthermore, Conquest in public events often walked away both from notions of the famine's intentionality and whether or not it was a genocide. During a 2006 Radio Free Europe interview, Conquest stated:
I don't think the word genocide as such is a very useful one. When I say if you want to use it you can, but it was invented for rather different purposes. I can see that the trouble is it implies that somebody, some other nation, or a large part of it were doing it, that the Nazis are more or less implicated, they are Germans. But I don't think this is true -- it wasn't a Russian exercise, the attack on the Ukrainian people. But it was a definite attack on them as they were discriminated against as far as death went.
Conquest goes on in the interview to attack Stalin as emblematic of the wider "mediocrity" of Marxist systems.
But this is not quite a renunciation in the classical sense of the word. Outside of some oblique references in prefaces to his various reprinted books, Conquest did not substantially alter their content. Conquest's correspondence with Wheatcroft/Davies was certainly a more nuanced argument than what was in the various reprints of Harvest of Sorrows. None of his later publications really addressed this issue; his Reflections on a Ravaged Century contends:
the Stalin leadership knew exactly what was happening and used famine as a means of terror, and of revenge, against the peasantry. {emphasis mine}
Reflections the proceeds to rake the various left-wing intellectuals of the 1930s and onward for being duped by such a cruel and mediocre system.
This waffling is one of many problems with Conquest. On one hand, he was clever enough to stake out an ambiguous position in public debates, whether in interviews or in intellectual forums. Yet he felt no need to add this nuance in his post-91 writings which are not that much indistinguishable from his Cold Warrior ones outside of a sort of smug triumphalism. Part of the problem here was that the largely anticommunist audience for Conquest's books just did not care for the nuances and complexities the archival revolution of the nineties opened up. It is very likely that Conquest, both being a canny intellectual and one whose profession (Kremlinology) was fast becoming irrelevant, recognized his audience and wrote books for them.