It is mainstream academic historical consensus that the "Holodomor" (more accurate called the 1932-33 famine) was not a deliberate genocide. The myth that it was, with an exaggerated death toll that is directly compared to the Holocaust is quite literally Nazi propaganda (though I must stress that certain overly dogmatic tendencies have a bad habit of going so far as to suggest the famine never happened and was itself Nazi propaganda). As a proportion of the population, the region that suffered most from the famine was Kazakhstan, primarily due to the nomadic population's greater dependence on their flocks of livestock, which were disproportionately slaughtered deliberately as a campaign of passive resistance to forced collectivization. Ukraine suffered second-worst not because Stalin wanted to kill as many Ukrainian as possible because he was racist, but because Ukraine was traditionally the breadbasket of the Russian Empire and as a result in times of severe famine the brute force of grain requisitions and the whip of labor discipline fell disproportionately on Ukraine in order to make for shortfalls in other regions of the Union.

Another primary point of the "Holodomor" narrative that is pushed to imply it was a deliberate genocide is blocking detachments and internal passports. In this period these were a general phenomenon, as desperate measures to prevent masses of peasants fleeing into the cities without authorization in search of food and work, which would have drastically exacerbated the famine and potentially fatally destabilized the Soviet government by inciting unrest in the urban centers that were the power base of the Communist Party. In effect, the Moscow center performed a triage, sacrificing the peasants to preserve the urban proletariat and the industrialization drive. Ruthless? Absolutely. Deliberate genocide? No. In fact, Stalin repeatedly released grain reserves for famine relief upon numerous appeals to the detriment of the annual plan targets.

The following excerpts are from the preface to the revised editions of The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-33, by RW Davies and Stephen G Wheatcroft

Since this book was completed, the Soviet famine of 1931-33 has become an international political issue. Following a number of preliminary declarations and a vigorous campaign among Ukrainians in Canada, in November 2006 a bill approved by the Ukrainian parliament...stated that the famine was 'an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people'. In the following year a three-day event commemorating the famine in Ukraine was held in its capital, Kiev, and at the same time Yushchenko, the president, called on the Ukrainian parliament to approve 'a new law criminalizing Holodomor denial' - so far without success. Then on May 28, 2008, the Canadian parliament passed a bill that recognized the Holodomor as a genocide and established a Ukrainian Famine and Genocide ('Holodomor') Memorial Day. Later in the year, on October 23, 2008, the European parliament, without committing itself to the view of the Ukrainian and Canadian parliament that the famine was an act of genocide, declared it was 'cynically and cruelly planned by Stalin's regime in order to force through the Soviet Union's policy of collectivization of agriculture'...

This campaign is reinforced by extremely high estimates of Ukrainian deaths from famine. On November 7, 2003, a statement to the United States General Assembly by 25 member-countries declared that 'the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine (Holodomor) took from 7 million to 10 million innocent lives'. According to Yushchenko, Ukraine 'lost about ten million people as a direct result of the Holodomor-genocide'...

In contrast, the Russian government has consistently objected to the Ukrainian view. On April 2, 2008, a statement was approved by the Russian State Duma declaring that there was no evidence that the 1933 famine was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. The statement condemned the Soviet regime's 'disregard for the lives of people in the attainment of economic and political goals', but also declared that 'there is no historic evidence that the famine was organized on ethnic grounds'. The official view was endorsed by the Russian archives, and by Russian historians...In the preface the director of the Russian archives, VP Kozlov, criticizes the 'politicization' of the famine:

Not even one document has been found confirming the concept of a 'golodomor-genocide' in Ukraine, nor even a hint in the documents of ethnic motives for what happened, in Ukraine and elsewhere. Absolutely the whole mass of documents testify that the main enemy of Soviet power at that time was not an enemy based on ethnicity, but an enemy based on class.

In our own work we, like VP Kozlov, have found no evidence that the Soviet authorities undertook a program of genocide against Ukraine. It is also certain that the statements by Ukrainian politicians and publicists about the deaths from famine in Ukraine are greatly exaggerated. A prominent Ukrainian historian, Stanislaus Kul'chitskii, estimated deaths from famine in Ukraine at 3-3.5 million; and Ukrainian demographers estimate that excess deaths in Ukraine in the whole period of 1926-39 (most of them during the famine) amounted to 3.5 million. Nevertheless, Ukrainian organizations continue, with some success, to urge Canadian schools to teach as a fact that excess deaths were 10 million during the 1932-33 famine. This does not mean that Ukraine did not suffer greatly during the famine. It is certainly the case that most of the famine deaths took place in Ukraine, and that the grain collection campaign was associated with the reversal of the previous policy of Ukrainization.

I'll stop the direct excerpts right there, since I've made my point. But the mainstream historical opinion is that the 1931-33 famine was a natural famine that was drastically exacerbated by the actions of the Communist Party and its campaigns of dekulakization and forced collectivization. To understand these events, one must understand that the revolutions of October 1917 were two parallel revolutions: the proletarian revolution in the cities, and the peasant revolution on the land. These parallel revolutions sat in uneasy tension with each other through the 1920s. When the simmering scissors crisis and a bad harvest in 1927 forced a re-evaluation of the New Economic Policy, coinciding with Stalin's final consolidation of power in the hands of himself and his surrounding clique, what followed was a radical reformation of agricultural and industrialization policy. It was, to be blunt, Stalin's declaration of war against the peasant revolution on the land - the destruction of entrenched peasant power in the village communes; the liquidation of kulaks (and "kulaks", after the actual kulaks were eradicated); and the reorganization of Soviet agriculture from backwards peasant commune-and-strip farming into collective and state farms. This forced collectivization drive coincided with a brutal program of crash industrialization meant to modernize Soviet industry to near-parity with the advanced capitalist world within ten years.

In effect, the drives of dekulakization, forced collectivization, and rapid industrialization were a massive continent-spanning program of primitive accumulation. The state became the primary accumulator and investor of capital, and distributor of commodities. And it took a bloody toll. This cannot be denied. But a deliberate genocide it absolutely was not.