that allegations by "mainstream academics", including Conquest, of genocide against the Soviet Union were historically dubious and politically motivated as part of a campaign by the Ukrainian nationalist community. In a letter to the editors, Conquest dismissed the article as "error and absurdity." Michael Ellman states that in the end it all depends on the definition of genocide and that if Stalin was guilty of genocide in the Holodomor, then "[m]any other events of the 1917–53 era (e.g. the deportation of whole nationalities, and the 'national operations' of 1937–38) would also qualify as genocide, as would the acts of [many Western countries]", such as the Atlantic slave trade, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, among many others. Historian Hiroaki Kuromiya finds it persuasive. As summarized by David R. Marples, Conquest's thesis that the famine constituted genocide and was deliberately inflicted is controversial and remains part of the ongoing debates on the Holodomor genocide question. Vladimir N. Brovkin describes it as a challenge to the "revisionist school" of historians, while Alexander Nove states "Conquest seems prone to accept the Ukrainian nationalist myth." Hiroaki writes that "those who examine the famine from a general Soviet perspective downplay any specific Ukrainian factor, while specialists on Ukraine generally support the concept of a genocidal famine." The most notable work in the field that maintains the famine was not genocide is by R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, both of whom cite a letter from Conquest stating "he does not believe that Stalin deliberately inflicted the 1933 famine." Sarah Davies and James Harris write that with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the release of the Soviet archives, some of the heat has gone out of the debate. A 1993 study of archival data by Getty et al. showed that a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953. Getty and Wheatcroft write that the opening of the Soviet archives has vindicated the lower estimates put forth by the "revisionist school" scholars. Another major part of the debate involved Soviet nationality policy and Stalin's deportations. Historian Jon Chang argued that many self-declared "social historians" generally falling into the revisionist school, relied almost exclusively on archival sources while neglecting oral history, despite social history officially being focused on the lived experiences of the common people. According to Chang, because of this