In general I think the issue is a lot of people equate Stalin with USSR. Things were substantially different both before and after him. And his reign was also from the 20s to the 50s in which there was the context of, amongst other major issues, WW2 where the Soviets lost tens of millions of people. As one can see in certain ongoing wars, exceptional loss of life seems to gradually push leaders towards having zero concern for life at all - let alone the liberties and values we hold to be desirable, even in authoritarian systems. When the "hard" decisions become quite easy, you're well on your way to dystopia.
The mass purges were deliberate, while the famine (polemically called the "Holodomor") was not. The famine was caused by Stalin's disastrous agricultural policy, but it wasn't a deliberate attempt to kill people.
>Broadly speaking, Russian historians are generally of the opinion that the Holodomor did not constitute a genocide. Among Ukrainian historians the general opinion is that it did constitute a genocide.
While I agree that one primary motive was to get more food, Communist atrocities generally start out with noble ideals, at least on paper. Pol Pot also intended to create an ideal society[1], at whatever cost.
Pol Pot actually intended to kill huge numbers of people and wipe out the cities. He had his own crazy philosophy about a peasant Utopia that had nothing to do with Marxism at all.
The Soviets wanted to increase agricultural yield, but the policies Stalin implemented caused the harvest in 1932 to fall by about 20%. In a country already just barely able to feed itself, that led to famine, not just in Ukraine but across the USSR.
> The famine was caused by Stalin's disastrous agricultural policy, but it wasn't a deliberate attempt to kill people.
Neo-Nazis argue the same about the Holocaust, namely, that there is not a single piece of evidence showing that the highest level of the German government, in Hitler's person, ever ordered the extermination of Jews (and this is true). They claim it was merely an unfortunate side-effect of various factors, such as widespread shortages, logistical issues caused by Allied aerial bombings, and so on.
However, when you zoom in on the personal level, the deliberateness becomes obvious in both cases. If someone came to your city, confiscated all the food, harshly punished any attempts to store even a minimal amount for basic survival, caused horrific starvation that killed many, drove survivors to such insanity that parents ate the flesh of their own children in the most extreme cases, and still blocked all foreign aid and prevented people from leaving, then what would you call it, if not deliberate mass murder?
> Neo-Nazis argue the same about the Holocaust, namely, that there is not a single piece of evidence showing that the highest level of the German government, in Hitler's person, ever ordered the extermination of Jews
We literally have the minutes of the Wannsee conference, in which the Nazis decided to kill all Jews.
The German state carried out a massive logistical operation of moving millions of people to specially built camps and gassing them to death. Comparing that to a famine is insane.
You're drawing an equivalence between patently absurd, factually false denialism about the Holocaust on the one hand, and the dominant scholarly view that the Soviet famine of the early 1930s was not a deliberate attempt to kill Ukrainians on the other hand.
Some of them do, but the difference is that their claim is complete and utter hogwash.
On the other side, pretty much everyone accepts that there was a major famine in the USSR in the early 1930s, mostly caused by Stalin's collectivization policy. That's just a fact.
The peak of Stalin's repression is somewhere in 1937-1939 - right before WW2, so you can't write it off to losses in the war. The reason is probably Stalin's paranoia and him seeing traitors everywhere, including his former comrades.
