Naimark, Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum have called the Holodomor a genocide and the intentional result of Stalinist policies. According to Lemkin, Holodomor "is a classic example of the Soviet genocide, the longest and most extensive experiment in Russification, namely the extermination of the Ukrainian nation". Lemkin stated that, because Ukrainians were very sensitive to the racial murder of its people and way too populous, the government could not follow the pattern of the Holocaust. Instead the extermination consisted of four steps: 1) extermination of the Ukrainian national elite 2) liquidation of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church 3) extermination of a significant part of the Ukrainian peasantry as "custodians of traditions, folklore and music, national language and literature 4) populating the territory with other nationalities with intent of mixing Ukrainians with them, which would eventually lead to the dissolvance of the Ukrainian nation. Other historians such as Michael Ellman consider the Holodomor a crime against humanity, but do not classify it as a genocide. Economist Steven Rosefielde and Robert Conquest, a historian and outspoken anti-communist, consider the death toll to be primarily due to state policy, not poor harvests. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Conquest was granted access to the Soviet state archives alongside other western academics. Wheatcroft later claimed that that in a unpublished private correspondence Conquest wrote that the Holodomor was not purposefully inflicted by Stalin but his inadequate response did worsen the famine. In an interview recorded in 2006 Conquest stated the Holodomor should be recognized as an attack on the Ukrainian people and discussed some of the problems surrounding the label genocide. Robert Davies, Stephen Kotkin, Stephen Wheatcroft and J. Arch Getty reject the notion that Stalin intentionally wanted to kill Ukrainians, but conclude that Stalinist policies and widespread incompetence among government officials set the stage for famine in Ukraine and other Soviet republics. In 1991, American historian Mark Tauger considered the Holodomor primarily the result of natural conditions and failed economic policy, not intentional state policy. Soviet and Western denial and downplay Scholars consider Holodomor denial to be the assertion that the 1932–1933 famine in Soviet Ukraine did not occur. Denying the existence of the famine was the Soviet state's position and reflected in both Soviet propaganda and the work of some Western journalists and intellectuals including George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty, and Louis Fischer. In Britain and the United States, eye-witness accounts