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.