Exactly how many people died in the purges is unclear. Conquest reckons that between 1937 and 1938, in the Soviet Union as a whole, 1 million people were executed, and 2 million died in labour camps, the total camp population at the end of the period being about 7 million, and the prison population another 1 million. Adam Ulam comes up with half a million people executed, and somewhere between 3 and 12 million sent to the camps.
