Exactly how many people died in the Great Hunger of 1932–3 is unclear. As Khrushchev admitted in his memoirs, ‘No one was keeping count’. Contemporaries spoke of 4 or 5 million. The historian Robert Conquest uses Soviet census data to arrive at a figure of 7 million: 5 million in Ukraine, 2 million elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Another 6.5 million, he reckons, died in ‘dekulakisation’ immediately beforehand. If Conquest is right, the whole operation killed over twice
