Having done my doctoral work in history before the revisionists conquered the academy (as the traditionalists retired), I never bought the revisionist line. It was very refreshing during the '90s to see all the stuff coming out from the Soviet archives.
Conquest's stuff is excellent and everyone should read The Black Book of Communism by disilllusioned French leftist scholars published in '97 in French and translated in '99.
The way my generation in the '60s read William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and learned about the horrors of Nazism, the current generation should read The Black Book of Communism!
Also highly recommended: Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims and Anti-Americanism. Hollander was one of the first to diagnose the strange compulsion of the intelligentisia to continue to embrace and embrace communist regimes even when faced with irrefutable evidence of their true nature.