[5] Matt Lenoe described the "revisionist school" as representing those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong.
In an appendix to the book, Getty also questioned the previously published findings that Stalin organized himself the murder of Sergey Kirov to justify his campaign of Great Purge.
It must be shared by the tens of thousands of activists and officials who carried out the policy and by the peasants who chose to slaughter animals, burn fields, and boycott cultivation in protest.
... Conquest's book will thus give a certain academic credibility to a theory which has not been generally accepted by non-partisan scholars outside the circles of exiled nationalities.
[14] In a 1993 study,[15] Getty wrote that the opening of the Soviet archives has vindicated the lower estimates put forth by the "revisionist school" scholars.
[16] Few oppose Getty's analysis,[citation needed] which has gained acceptance,[citation needed] of broader society's will and power to resist, with a degree of autonomy to the bureaucracy and other professional groups in opposition to Soviet central power, over that of totalitarianism through one-sided hierarchical processes in which a despotic leadership exercised violence on a passive population, which was also defenseless.