There was a natural famine happening at the time and people were starting to starve in central Asia, particularly in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Part of the problem was that for generations, a new class of peasants had begun to form who were able to buy and own land, gradually displacing the former feudal system where most of the land was used by peasants for distant landowners who weren't really interested in the region.

This new landlord class (kulaks) basically perpetuated the same feudal system, with other peasants continuing to work for them on the land they acquired. Naturally this exacerbated wealth inequality in the region and gave the landlord class relative privilege and control over the peasant workers.

When the famine hit and people started to starve, the landlord class was relatively insulated from the problem, even being able to hoard food and resources. As the workers became more desperate, they were willing to work for less food, which allowed the landlords to hoard more, which made the workers position more desperate, causing them to be willing to work for less, and so forth in a snowball effect.

All of this was pretty normal for the region. It was a problem, with the relatively wealthy hoarding wealth and the workers becoming increasingly desperate to work for them in the middle of a natural disaster, but it was a problem central Asia had been dealing with for hundreds of years, if not longer. The new landlordism wasn't particularly parasitic when compared to feudalism, but it was parasitic nonetheless.

When people started starving to death the government stepped in and started organizing collective farms, redistributing land and hoarded resources to the peasants so that they could work for and feed themselves in a more efficient, equitable model for everyone.

The landowning class however, like capital controlling classes throughout history, weren't satisfied to work for themselves and allow the peasants to work for themselves alongside them.

Their response was to start sabotaging the collective farms, and to begin raiding and destroying depots where food was being distributed to starving people, as well as burning fields, grain silos, and slaughtering livestock, including breeding stock and egg and dairy producing stock.

Even anti-Communist propagandists like Robert Conquest (whose propaganda was cited extensively during the Cold War before most of it was debunked and he was forced to recant his claims over and over again) claim that the landowning class destroyed about 96 million head of cattle, and possibly twice as much tonnage of grain and other foodstock, completely wrecking the food production capacity of the region in the middle of the famine and exacerbating the problem beyond anything seen before.

The death toll is vastly overblown by those who want to make it out to be a genocide perpetrated the the Soviet government against her own people. The aforementioned Robert Conquest initially claimed a completely unrealistic 20-30 million deaths, before revising his claim by several million just years after his now infamous propaganda piece was published, and again as low as 13-15 million deaths decades later when his claims were immediately and categorically disproven by the opening of the Soviet archives.

As genuine investigative research continues to debunk claim after claim made by propagandists like him, the numbers continue to dwindle and the legacy of the self-proclaimed "Cold Warriors" is continuously eroded. To this day, the Ukrainian government claims ~4 million cases of starvation in the region during that period, completely disregarding blatantly false "research" conducted from a time before evidence was even available.

Eventually before his death, Conquest was forced to admit that there was no way the Soviets could have caused the famine, although he stubbornly refused to admit that they did anything to prevent it or that the land-owning capitalist class destroying 2-4 million tons of food for every starving person and wrecking the productive capacity of the region might have been responsible, despite this being the inevitable conclusion of his lifelong body of work, ironically vindicating the Soviets through desperate attempts to portray them as villains.

Decades of propaganda and its consequences are hard to undo however, and these indisputable, verifiable facts of recorded history are never welcomed in certain circles. The western public consciousness truly is a poisoned well, and facts alone aren't enough to undo that damage.

credit to /u/spookyjohnathan