Here at Accuracy in Academia, we mostly get to cover only ersatz intellectuals. Actual scholars, we too frequently find, are far fewer in number. The ranks of them just got thinner this month with the passing of Robert Conquest and Peter Schramm. “Robert Conquest spent decades estimating a casualty rate amassed from the testimony of defectors,” I noted in 2009. “Most academics denigrated his work, relying on Soviet government statistics instead.” “Few of them volunteered to carry Conquest on their shoulders when his numbers proved closer to the actual count than theirs. For this reason, he wanted to retitle the...