What I'd *Like* To Write In My Paper, But Won't
While a universally agreed-upon estimate of the number of victims of Stalin's Purges will probably never be reached, the existing literature does support the conclusion that majority of the researchers on this question consider themselves to be victims of their colleague's Stalinist  persecution.  An example that could stand for the rest can be found in Sheila Fitzpatrick's 1993 paper  on the Moscow and Leningrad telephone directories and the Great Purge.

My preliminary report on the telephone study, delivered to the Russian Research Center at Harvard University in 1978, was very critically received, probably mainly for political reasons (since Harvard at that time was an unfriendly environment for revisionist Sovietologists), but partly also for methodological ones. I took the methodological criticism seriously and decided to change my sampling technique...

So, basically, she admits her original report was crappy, but people hated it just because they were *after* her.  Though, this is mild compared to Robert Conquest's pattern of accusing  Stephen Wheatcroft of being Stalin's present-day henchman.

I used to *respect* a lot of these scholars before I started reading their fights.