Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest
Born	15 July 1917 Great Malvern, England, United Kingdom
Died	3 August 2015 Stanford, California, United States

George Robert Acworth Conquest (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was an anti-communist historian and former British intelligence officer. Even many anti-communists have rejected his claims of genocide against Ukrainians during the 1931–1933 Soviet famine. He has also severely exaggerated repression during the Soviet purges. Many of his writings rely on writings from obscure émigrés or secondhand stories. He claimed that 3.5 million kulaks died after being deported to Siberia, more than twice the total number of deportees.

Claimed death tolls

Conquest claimed that there were five million political prisoners in the Soviet Union in 1934. In reality, there were less than 170,000 out of a total prison population of 510,307. He claimed that seven million were imprisoned during the Great Purge when the actual number was only 1,317,195, including common criminals, and only 115,922 died in the camps compared to his claim of two million. Conquest also said that the death rate in the gulags was 855,000 per year when it was only 49,000 during peace time and 194,000 during the war.

Conquest claims that Stalin killed 15 million people during the 1930s. He based this claim off a predicted population of 184 million (based on the growth rate of the 1920s) in 1939 compared to an actual population 169 million, ignoring the fact that birth rates decrease when countries industrialize. According to Stephen Wheatcroft, birth rates were 1.5% lower from 1932 to 1936 than they were in the 1920s and 0.5% lower during the rest of the 1930s.