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# How Many Suffered in Dekulakisation: Estimates by Zemskov, Ivnitsky and Conquest
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/snimok-1930-goda-na-kotorom-zapechatleno-vyselenie-kulaka-i-ego-semi/
- Published: 2026-10-03T20:20:34.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-04T12:00:24.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Science, Society

A photograph of 1930 showing the deportation of a kulak and his family

The number of victims of dekulakisation has still not been established and can hardly be stated unambiguously, since the figure includes both those directly repressed (stripped of their property, evicted, exiled, arrested) and, on occasion, the victims of the famine that followed collectivisation.

Viktor Zemskov believes that about 3.5 million people were dekulakised. Nikolai Ivnitsky, his colleague at the Institute of Russian History, speaks of about 1.1 million households, that is, 5-6 million people, including "self-dekulakisation" and those dekulakised without deportation. As for those deported, he puts the figure at 4 million. According to the records of the OGPU-NKVD for 1930-1940, more than 2 million people passed through the "kulak exile", that is, through the special settlements, of whom 1.8 million arrived there in 1930-1931 alone.

Dreadful figures. And what of those who perished directly as a result of dekulakisation? These are people shot under the first category, those who died in the camps, and those who died in the special settlements and on the transports. Archival estimates give no fewer than 600 thousand deaths, that is, realistically on the order of 1 million, once one adds the unrecorded mortality of 1930-1931, when it was hardly registered at all, and the executions. For the years 1932-1940 alone Zemskov found about 390 thousand registered deaths in the labour settlements.

And these are two decidedly moderate Soviet-Russian authors. The British historian Robert Conquest, for instance, arrived by demographic calculation at 6.5 million dead as a result of dekulakisation alone, and separately 7 million victims of the famine. Solzhenitsyn, for his part, wrote of 15 million peasants sent into exile.

Will a monument ever appear in Russia to the millions of dekulakised, and to those who perished from dekulakisation?