His first books on Russia, Common Sense About Russia (1960), Power and Policy in the USSR (1961), and Russia After Khrushchev (1965) were solid, rather than exciting. But it was The Great Terror that really established his reputation as an historian. By the time it was published the Cold War was into its third decade and there were seemingly few illusions about Soviet Russia. All the same, Conquest opened many eyes to the full scale of that horror and everything he wrote was to be vindicated as the Soviet archives were finally opened. In fact, the figures of Stalin’s victims which Conquest had given, and for which he had once been derided, have been steadily revised upwards by younger Russian historians to at least 25 million. Most of their deaths were not ordered by the dictator in person, but plenty were. Conquest described how one day in 1937 Stalin and Molotov personally approved 3,167 death sentences, and then went to watch a film.