I know the great depression is taught largely as an American thing but the world economy was so connected even at that point where a lot of cities and countries across the globe were having severe issues.

Look at how they mention the Holodomor for instance, it makes a lot more sense even to the most ardent of chuds why they were having such struggles when you contextualize it as occuring at the same exact time as the great depression. Even in the relatively still rich for the time US, food was scarce and people were starving.

When you know the actual context of the era and realize that the Soviet famines while particularly severe were in a period when even the non famine nations were massively struggling with food, it's a lot harder to see them as just being evil people purposely engineering death.