starvation in the USSR

The borders of the Ukraine were not even the same in 1926 and 1939. The Kuban Cossaks, between 2 and 3 million people, were registered as Ukrainian in 1926, but were reclassified as Russian at the end of the twenties. This new classification explains by itself 25 to 40 per cent of the `victims of the famine-genocide’ calculated by Dushnyck–Mace.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 107 [p. 91 on the NET]

(Alec Nove)
Additionally, the figures on famine-related deaths cannot be precise, for “definitional” reasons…. Ukrainian statistics show a very large decline in births in 1933-34, which could be ascribed to a sharp rise in abortions and also to the non-reporting of births of those who died in infancy.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 269

Soviet mistakes and excesses, drought and the organized campaign of sabotage and resistance resulted in the famine of 1932-1933. There was no plan to wipe out Ukrainians as a people; the mistakes–even when accompanied by tragic and unforgivable excesses– do not constitute “pre-planned genocide.”
The famine was compounded by typhus epidemics. Internationally acclaimed urban planner and recipient of the Order of Canada, Dr. Hans Blumenfeld worked as an architect in the Ukrainian city of Makeyevka at the time the famine. He writes:
“There was indeed a famine in 1933, not just in Ukraine, but also in… the lower Volga and the North Caucasus;… There is no doubt that the famine claimed many victims. I have no basis on which to estimate their number… Probably most deaths in 1933 were due to epidemics of typhus, typhoid fever, and dysentery. Waterborne diseases were frequent in Makeyevka; I narrowly survived an attack of typhus fever.
Dr. Hans Blumenfeld offers a useful personal summary of the period:
… [The famine was caused by] a conjunction of a number of factors. First, the hot dry summer of 1932, which I had experienced in northern Vyatka, had resulted in crop failure in the semiarid regions of the south. Second, the struggle for collectivization had disrupted agriculture. Collectivization was not an orderly process following bureaucratic rules. It consisted of actions by the poor peasants, encouraged by the Party. The poor peasants were eager to expropriate the “kulaks,” but less eager to organize a co-operative economy. By 1930 the Party had already sent out cadres to stem and correct excesses…. After having exercised restraint in 1930, the Party put on a drive again in 1932. As a result, in that year the kulak economy ceased to produce, and the new collective economy did not yet produce fully. First claim on the inadequate product went to urban industry and to the armed forces; as the future of the entire nation, including the peasants, depended on them, it can hardly be otherwise….
In 1933 rainfall was adequate. The Party sent its best cadres to help organize work in the kolkhozes. They succeeded; after the harvest of 1933 the situation improved radically and with amazing speed. I had the feeling that we had been pulling a heavy cart uphill, uncertain if we would succeed; but in the fall of 1933 we had gone over the top and from then on we could move forward at an accelerating pace.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 96-97

Soviet mistakes and excesses, drought and the organized campaign of sabotage and resistance resulted in the famine of 1932-1933. There was no plan to wipe out Ukrainians as a people; the mistakes–even when accompanied by tragic and unforgivable excesses– do not constitute “pre-planned genocide.”
The famine was compounded by typhus epidemics. Internationally acclaimed urban planner and recipient of the Order of Canada, Dr. Hans Blumenfeld worked as an architect in the Ukrainian city of Makeyevka at the time the famine. He writes:
“There was indeed a famine in 1933, not just in Ukraine, but also in… the lower Volga and the North Caucasus;… There is no doubt that the famine claimed many victims. I have no basis on which to estimate their number… Probably most deaths in 1933 were due to epidemics of typhus, typhoid fever, and dysentery. Waterborne diseases were frequent in Makeyevka; I narrowly survived an attack of typhus fever.
Dr. Hans Blumenfeld offers a useful personal summary of the period:
… [The famine was caused by] a conjunction of a number of factors. First, the hot dry summer of 1932, which I had experienced in northern Vyatka, had resulted in crop failure in the semiarid regions of the south. Second, the struggle for collectivization had disrupted agriculture. Collectivization was not an orderly process following bureaucratic rules. It consisted of actions by the poor peasants, encouraged by the Party. The poor peasants were eager to expropriate the “kulaks,” but less eager to organize a co-operative economy. By 1930 the Party had already sent out cadres to stem and correct excesses…. After having exercised restraint in 1930, the Party put on a drive again in 1932. As a result, in that year the kulak economy ceased to produce, and the new collective economy did not yet produce fully. First claim on the inadequate product went to urban industry and to the armed forces; as the future of the entire nation, including the peasants, depended on them, it can hardly be otherwise….
In 1933 rainfall was adequate. The Party sent its best cadres to help organize work in the kolkhozes. They succeeded; after the harvest of 1933 the situation improved radically and with amazing speed. I had the feeling that we had been pulling a heavy cart uphill, uncertain if we would succeed; but in the fall of 1933 we had gone over the top and from then on we could move forward at an accelerating pace.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 96-97

<<note from me>>The following is referring to the stockpiling of resources in response to Japanese imperialism and their attacks close to Russia. Allow me to also note that some grain was also sent to mitigate the effects, but much was kept for what was believed at the time to be a war waiting to happen.<<end note from me>>

Their [peasants] living standards were so reduced that they fell easy prey to the malnutrition diseases–typhus, cholera, and scurvy, always endemic in Russia–and infected the urban populations….
Russia was wasted with misery, but the Red Army had restored its food reserves and its reserves of gasoline, and cloth and leather for uniforms and boots. And Japan did not attack. In August, 1932, the completion of the Dnieper Dam was celebrated in a way that echoed around the world. And Japan did not attack. Millions of Russian acres were deserted and untilled; millions of Russian peasants were begging for bread or dying. But Japan did not attack.
…The shortages of food and commodities in Russia were attributed, as Stalin had intended, to the tension of the Five-Year Plan, and all that Japanese spies could learn was that the Red Army awaited their attack without anxiety. Their spearhead, aimed at Outer Mongolia and Lake Baikal, were shifted, and her troops moved southwards into the Chinese province of Jehol, which they conquered easily and added to ” Manchukuo.” Stalin had won his game against terrific odds, but Russia had paid in lives as heavily as for war.
In the light of this and other subsequent knowledge, it is interesting for me to read my own dispatches from Moscow in the winter of 1932-33. I seem to have known what was going on, without in the least knowing why, that is without perceiving that Japan was the real key to the Soviet problem at that time, and that the first genuine improvement in the agrarian situation coincided almost to a day with the Japanese southward drive against Jehol.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 193