Several scholars have disputed the allegation that the famine was a genocidal campaign which was waged by the Soviet government, including J. Arch Getty,[27] Stephen G. Wheatcroft,[2] R. W. Davies,[28] and Mark Tauger.[29] Getty says that the "overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives ... is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan."[27] Wheatcroft says that the Soviet government's policies during the famine were criminal acts of fraud and manslaughter, though not outright murder or genocide.[30][c] Joseph Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin states that while "there is no question of Stalin's responsibility for the famine" and many deaths could have been prevented if not for the counterproductive and insufficient Soviet measures, there is no evidence for Stalin's intention to kill the Ukrainians deliberately.[31] History professor Ronald Grigor Suny says that most scholars reject the view that the famine was an act of genocide, seeing it instead as resulting from badly conceived and miscalculated Soviet economic policies.[32]

Your serious scholars -- people who've actually gone through old Soviet internal documents -- say that at worst the Soviet famine was basically mismanagement. The idea that the Soviets intentionally starved their own people started as Nazi propaganda, was recycled into anticommunist propaganda by the U.S. and its allies, and has now become the sort of pop history you find on airport bookshelves but would be quickly dismissed by any real academic.

See also:

https://www.villagevoice.com/2020/11/21/in-search-of-a-soviet-holocaust/