A census taken in January 1937 was suppressed, and the census board was shot as (in the words of official communique) “a serpent’s nest of traitors in the apparatus of Soviet statistics”; they had, Pravda stated, “…exerted themselves to diminish the popula¬tion of the Soviet Union.”

In Khrushchev’s time a later head of the Census Board wrote sardonically that the State Planning Commission had been very incompetent in its population predictions, having forecast 180.7 million for 1937 when the real total was 164 million. This enor¬mous discrepancy can be reduced to about 11 1/2 million for various reasons (for ex¬ample, children unborn owing to prematurely dead parents). Of this, the famine deaths seem to have been about 7 million-5 million in the Ukraine, 1 million in the Kuban and North Caucasus, 1 million in the Don and lower Volga. Three million had already died in the dekulakization, and c. 1 million (out of c 4 million) Kazakhs had perished as a result of the banning of their nomad life and resettlement on desert “farms”. To this 11+ million we must add c. 3 million + for the peasants in labor camps at the time of the 1937 census and dying there later, for a reasonable estimate of the victims of the whole anti-peasant and anti-Ukraine operation of c. 14 1/2 mil¬lion. The total dead in all countries in World War I was under 9 million.

There have been many useful books, usually of a specialist nature, about one aspect or other of the Stalinist revolution in the countryside, and many individual testimonies have also appeared; but there has not previously been a general history covering the whole phenomenon.

Yet the material only needed to be brought together. We have literally hundreds of first-hand accounts, from victims and from officials, from foreign communists and from journalists: that is, first hand observers. We have official material, both from the early 1930s and from the Khrushchev period, which strongly indicates much of the truth. And we have fiction, from the orthodox Sholokhov in the 1930s, through novels published in the U.S.S.R. in Khrushchev’s time and even in the early 1980s, to say nothing of samizdat and emigre work, in which the events are presented in only slightly dramatized form.

All of them tell, or contribute to, the same story. Every point made here can be overwhelmingly documented. Soviet history, and therefore the Soviet Union today-and so the world today-cannot be properly understood without a full knowledge of such major determining events as those described above.

Mr. MARCHISHIN: Thank you very much, Dr. Conquest. We all appreciate your testimony here today, and I would like to ask the fellow commissioners if there are any questions.
Ms. MAZURKEVICH: Do you feel that Stalin’s policy of forced famine directed against the Ukrainian people was a policy to eliminate the Ukrainian people? Would you call it a policy of genocide?
Dr. CONQUEST: It certainly would seem to me to be genocide under the terms of the Genocide Convention, the United Nations’ Genocide Convention. That does not say you have to try to kill everybody—you crush, you kill large numbers of a national group, with a view of crushing it as a national group. Under that definition of genocide, certainly.