Conquest estimates that between 10 and 12 million peasants were dekulakised up to the spring of 1933, when mass deportation (though not that of individual families) was brought to an end, and that within two years about a third of them had died. ‘In hardly four months,’ wrote a survivor of a camp on the river Dvina, ‘it was necessary to construct several cemeteries . . . cemeteries so large that it would have taken a big European city several years to have as many.’
