Conquests work, as many are aware, was pretty groundbreaking back in the day, with The Great Terror, and then The Harvest of Sorrow, being searing indictments of the Soviet Union and its crimes. Although always a bit controversial, Conquests work became doubly so in more recent decades, but being only marginally versed in the historiography, it is hard to really get a fair reading of just how it work should be weighed now, at least based on wiki-diving.

What I do see is a lot of historiographical bickering, and this being centered in the Soviet-era archives, with Conquest and his (apocryphal) I Told You So, You Fucking Fools clearly feeling that whatever the small discrepancies that might have emerged, he was nevertheless vindicated in the general picture - a view at least some others seem to agree with - while others opine that the archives laid bare just how obsolete his work is and it ought to be, ahem, consigned of the dustbin of history (that's what the historiography section of the library is labeled, right?).

What are the arguments here? I doubt that there is an answer, given how ideological so much of it feels even today, but I'd love to see the debate - both its history over the past two decades and its current state - laid out in layman's terms so I can get a better grasp of it.