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And he does the same for the many Western observers – intellectuals, writers, journalists, and left activists – who were oblivious to it or actively sought to hush it up, even decades later when there were no longer any shreds of doubt. This is the equivalent of Holocaust denial.

And a Holocaust it was. While left-wing apologists pooh-poohed the numbers of purge deaths as in the thousands, the estimates of those killed politically in the people’s progressive utopia are now solidly in the eight figures, with as many as 15 to 20 million arrested and executed, or worked to death in the camps, in the years up until Stalin’s death in 1953. As many more died were starved by the Communists in the Ukraine to break the peasantry a few years earlier. Yet most people seem never to have heard of any of this.

In the Terror itself, Stalin and the NKVD prosecuted fictitious espionage, sabotage and subversion charges against millions of people. Those arrested would be tortured until they agreed to confess and implicate others. Most did, and quickly. It wound down only when the NKVD saw that, mathematically, every citizen of the nation would soon be implicated. But it flared up periodically until Stalin’s death in 1953.

The purges served several purposes. They transformed the USSR from a dictatorship of the proletariat into Stalin’s despotism. They removed most previous party members and high-ranking officials, suppressing alternate notions of what Communism was about, and replaced them with ruthless Stalinists. Those persecuted included those who had been non-Bolshevik leftists, even if they since had conformed; Bolsheviks who had subscribed to Lenin’s agricultural compromise delaying collectivization to boost agricultural production; Trotskyites; and finally, Stalinists and the NKVD themselves, for no ostensible reason but merely to terrify and cow.

Stalin meanwhile could blame the country’s Bolshevik-destroyed economy on the fictional sabotage “confessed to” in public trials, or to foreign spies. And he could blame the purge’s excesses on the NKVD itself.

We see the breakdown of figures and how they were derived: those executed with or without trial, those deported to slave labor camps, those executed in the camps, and those merely worked to death within them. The death rate for those sent to slave labor camps was around 90 percent. There are some camps whose mere existence cannot be confirmed firsthand because no one is known to have survived them to give testimony.

This is an essential part of the anti-Communist canon, certainly on the top shelf. Conquest’s work here confirms his original book and shows that its estimates, if off in any way, were too conservative.