Anne Applebaum, Red Famine:
"In practice, ‘genocide’, as defined by the UN documents, came to mean the physical elimination of an entire ethnic group, in a manner similar to the Holocaust. The Holodomor does not meet that criterion. The Ukrainian famine was not an attempt to eliminate every single living Ukrainian; it was also halted, in the summer of 1933, well before it could devastate the entire nation"
Stephane Courtois/Nicolas Werth, The Black Book of Communism:
"Should one see this famine as a genocide of the Ukrainian people, as a number of Ukrainian historians and researchers do today? It is undeniable that the Ukrainian peasantry were the principal victims in the famine of 1932-33 (…) But proportionally the famine was just as severe in the Cossack territories of the Kuban and the Don and in Kazakhstan"
Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia 1891-1991:
Robert Service, Stalin - A Biography:"No hard evidence has so far come to light of the regime's intention to kill millions through famine, let alone of a genocide campaign against the Ukrainians. Many parts of Ukraine were ethnically mixed. There is no data to suggest that there was a policy of taking more grain from Ukrainian villages than from the Russians or other ethnic groups in the famine area. And Ukraine was not the only region to suffer terribly from the famine, which was almost as bad in Kazakhstan."
Stephen Kotkin, Stalin - Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941:"Although Stalin did not seek the extermination of all Ukrainians and Kazakhs, he certainly aimed to extirpate all opposition real and potential from among them. The ultimate objective, though, was to turn Ukraine and Kazakhstan into economically efficient Soviet republics. He therefore allowed both peoples to retain their culture…"
Alexander Solshenistyn:This becomes “genocide” when the authors include the executions of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, poets, musicians, artists, church officials. They offer no evidence of intentional starvation or of ethnic targeting. They do not dwell on the ethnic Ukrainian agency in the alleged genocide against Ukrainians (in regions where lots of Russians lived and died). They do not include the Volga Valley, Kazakhstan, the Urals, Western Siberia, and other famine-wracked regions where Ukrainians did not form a large percentage of the population.
On Robert Conquest backpedaling:In 2008, he published an article on Izvestia calling the Holodomor a "provocatory cry about a 'genocide' that was started in the minds of Ukrainian chauvinists decades later" (Source: https://iz.ru/news/335020)
"In 2003, Dr. Conquest wrote to us explaining that he does not hold the view 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"
(R.W. Davies & Stephen G. Wheatcroft. "Debate. Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932 - 33: A Reply to Ellman.")
"In June 2006 a Ukrainian delegation of experts on the Holocaust and the Golodomor met Robert Conquest in Stanford University and enquired about his views, and were told directly by him that he preferred not to use the term genocide (Kul’chitskii (2007), 176)"
(From R.W. Davies / Stephen Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger - Soviet Agriculture 1931-1933)
Grover Furr on the reaction of other historians (From Blood Lies):
On the Russian release of archival documents:"There is no evidence it was intentionally directed against Ukrainians," said Alexander Dallin of Stanford, the father of modern Sovietology. "That would be totally out of keeping with what we know — it makes no sense."
"This is crap, rubbish," said Moshe Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania, whose 'Russian Peasants and Soviet Power' broke new ground in social history. "I am an anti-Stalinist, but I don't see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It's adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology.
"I absolutely reject it," said Lynne Viola of SUNY-Binghamton, the first US historian to examine Moscow's Central State Archive on collectivization. "Why in god's name would this paranoid government consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?
"He's terrible at doing research," said veteran Sovietologist Roberta Manning of Boston College. "He misuses sources, he twists everything."
In a polite but firmly negative review of Conquest's book in the London Review of Books in 1987 American Soviet scholar J. Arch Getty wrote: Conquest's hypothesis, sources and evidence are not new. Indeed, he himself first put forward his view two years ago in a work sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. The intentional famine story, however, has been an article of faith for Ukrainian émigrés in the West since the Cold War. Much of Conquest's most graphic description is taken from such period-pieces as The Golgoltha of the Ukraine (1953), The Black Deeds of the Kremlin (1953) and Communism the Enemy of Mankind (1955). 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. In today's conservative political climate, with its 'evil empire' discourse, I am sure that the book will be very popular.
“In the archives of Russia, in the archives of the republics of the former USSR, millions of documents have been preserved [of] the famine in the USSR at the beginning of the 1930s of the last century in various regions of the large country. Not a single document has been found confirming the conception of a ‘Holodomor-genocide’ in Ukraine or even a hint in the documents about ethnic motives of what occurred, including in Ukraine.” (Source: V. P. Kozlov, Golod v SSSR 1930-1934; Famine in the USSR 1930-1934 (2009)