I get that you are lying to win the argument here and are just making shit up but no, it is incredibly well documented and looked at in incredibly boring books like ‘The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (Industrialisation of Soviet Russia)’ that literally digs through russian and ukranian archives and looks at seed data and is again incredibly boring but comes to the conclusion that the Soviet famine which I quote:

Our study of the famine has led us to very different conclusions from Dr Conquest’s. He holds that Stalin ‘wanted a famine’, that ‘the Soviets did not want the famine to be coped with successfully’, and that the Ukrainian famine was ‘deliberately inflicted for its own sake’. This leads him to the sweeping conclusion: ‘The main lesson seems to be that the Communist ideology provided the motivation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children. We do not at all absolve Stalin from responsibility for the famine. His policies towards the peasants were ruthless and brutal. But the story which has emerged in this book is of a Soviet leadership which was struggling with a famine crisis which had been caused partly by their wrongheaded policies, but was unexpected and undesirable. The background to the famine is not simply that Soviet agricultural policies were derived from Bolshevik ideology, though ideology played its part. They were also shaped by the Russian pre-revolutionary past, the experiences of the civil war, the international situation, the intransigeant circumstances of geography and the weather, and the modus operandi of the Soviet system as it was established under Stalin. They were formulated by men with little formal education and limited knowledge of agriculture. Above all, they were a consequence of the decision to industrialise this peasant country at breakneck speed.

Anyone should take some boring history book over ‘a family member of a friend person I know’.

I have heard of it that is why I referenced it, this argument has been raging for decades. The idea of a terror famine has been pushed in popular media even though it is not the common view held by experts in the field of study. I’ll link one of the funnier exchanges on the subject in Getty’s review of Conquest’s harvest of sorrow (one of the more more widely cited sources in popular culture of the intentional famine narrative) in the London review of books.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n02/j.-arch-getty/starving-the-ukraine

For context this was also written before western academics has access to the Soviet archives which further served to vindicate the Getty’s criticism of the narrative.

No one denies that there was death and hardship. When you call something genocide you are saying there was a deliberate effort to eradicate a peoples, there isn’t sufficient evidence of intentionality or malice to come to the conclusion of genocide. You can say there was a poorly planned and executed state policy(I personally think it could have been better handled) but it also ignores the global context of wide spread crop failures at the time, for example in the north American dust bowl or the West African famines (I’d argue you can make a much more substantiated claim of genocide in West Africa). It also ignores the material conditions that Soviet agriculture at the time was underdeveloped because of the serfdom under the tsars.

I don’t expect us to reconcile but when your response is just my grandma says so you come off as unserious and that’s why you are getting dunked on. In America a popular boomer conspiracy that people will attest to is that there were Jews celebrating when 9/11 happened it doesn’t mean it’s correct or should be taken seriously.