In due course the statisticians found ways to make the numbers match the rhetoric. They massaged data to mask the high number of prisoners in the north and east of the USSR—the years 1937–9 were a time of major Gulag expansion—and, of course, to hide the ravages of the famine. Census forms for more than 350,000 people residing elsewhere were assigned to Ukraine. Another 375,000 dead souls were allotted to Kazakhstan. As well
