1. Regarding Conquest’s pre-perestroika estimates of excess deaths in the 1930s, in The Great Terror Conquest estimated that 3,500,000 people died during collectivization, 3,500,000 in the camps up to 1936, two million in the camps in 1937–38, and that in addition there were one million executions.footnote1 These add up to ten million, and obviously exclude the famine. In Harvest of Terror he claimed that at a minimum fourteen million peasants alone died prematurely in the 1930s, including seven million in the famine, and that 70–80 per cent of those in the camps were peasants.footnote2 These figures certainly imply at least seventeen million excess deaths in total.

2. Eleven million excess deaths in 1926–36 cannot be ‘readily deduced’ from the 1926 and 1937 population census data because we do not know the true birth rate, especially during the famine.

3. On executions a variety of figures have been produced by Russian government officials, without any explanation of their provenance. I cited the highest figure—seven million. Conquest used to look kindly on this figurefootnote3 but now appears, correctly, to reject it. The top-secret figures for executions supplied by the kgb to the Politburo in various documents from 1953 onwards (including the figure of 681,692 in 1937–38) certainly omit some executions—for instance, of Polish officers in 1940. We shall have to await greater openness of the kgb archives before we can decide between my suspicion of the figure of 1,750,000 and Conquest’s support for it.

Naturally the total number of arrests in Zemskov’s figures is higher than the number of arrests given in the kgb documents, which do not include the large number of arrests of criminals by the civil authorities dealt with by the ordinary courts.

4. Conquest’s figure of nine million in camps and prisons in late 1938, excluding criminals, which he described at the time as ‘highly conservative’, was obviously a gross over-estimate, and it would prevent the perpetuation of error if he admitted this.

5. I clearly stated in my article that Lorimer’s estimate for excess deaths was too low, and that I had been mistaken in accepting it. I am at a loss to understand why Conquest claims that I still support it.

6. While Conquest found several ‘errors’ in my article which are not there, he did not spot an actual error, for which I apologize. The column for 1939 in the table on p. 67 should read: