From famine historian Mark Tauger's Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933:

Until recently both scholarly and popular discussions of the catastrophic famine in the Soviet Union in 1931-1933 invariably have described it as an artificial or "man-made" famine. ... While the intentionalist interpretations of the famine remain widely held, recent research has cast substantial doubt on them. Several studies and document collections have shown conclusively that the famine did not stop at Ukraine's borders, but affected rural and urban areas throughout the Soviet Union, and even the military. Studies based on this evidence, and on a reevaluation of published Soviet statistics, has shown that the grain harvests of 1931 and 1932 must have been much smaller than officially acknowledged. … The fact that a disastrous famine followed the 1932 procurements must have been at least in part the result of a smaller harvest.

Certainly, the harvest decline was not the only cause of the Soviet famine: the regime exported food during the crisis. The amount of grain exported during the peak of the famine in the first half of 1933, however, approximately 220,000 tons, was small, less than 1 percent of the lowest harvest estimates, and the regime was using virtually all the rest of the available harvest to feed people.

The Soviet government did have small reserves of grain, but continually drew these down to allocate food to the population. Since virtually the entire country experienced shortages of food, indicating that the procurement and distribution data are reasonably accurate, clearly the Soviet Union faced a severed shortage, and the most important cause of that shortage has to have been small harvests in 1931 and 1932.

Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft argue that the 1931 and 1932 harvests were small due to drought and difficulties in labor and capital, especially the decline in draft animals. D'Ann Penner, in two studies of the famine in the North Caucasus and Don regions, rejects drought as an important factor in the region's small harvest in 1932 and instead attributes it to peasant resistance, specifically a strike against the Soviet regime. These studies thus represent two contrasting perspectives on the harvest, and therefore on the famine: one focusing on the old Russian agrarian problems of weather and poverty, exacerbated by collectivization and the economic crises of the five-year plan, the other focusing on familiar political aspects, the conflict between the rapacious Soviet regime and the resentful, resistant peasantry. Their studies work from different assumptions and employ different sources: Davies and Wheatcroft relied more on published sources and consider the country as a whole, Penner more on archival materials that focus on one region, albeit an important one.

In this essay I reexamine the harvest of 1931 and especially 1932 on the basis of newly available archival documents and published sources, including some that scholars have never utilized. I show that the environmental context of these famines deserves much greater emphasis that [sic] it has previously received: environmental disasters reduced the Soviet grain harvest in 1932 substantially and have to be considered among the primary causes of the famine. I argue that capital and labor were significant but were not as important as these environmental factors, and were in part a result of them. I also demonstrate that the Soviet leadership did not fully understand the crisis and out of ignorance acted inconsistently in reponse to it. I concluded that it is thus inaccurate to descrube the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as simply an artificial or man-made famine, or otherwise to reduce it to a single cause. Overall, the low harvest, and hence the famine, resulted from a complex of human and environmental factors, an interaction of man and nature, much as most previous famines in history.

...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.

Source: comrade /u/marxatemyacid over at /r/GenZedong, who sums it up as:

It was obviously not Stalin stopping the rain and eating 20 gajillion babies but I dont think saying he did literally nothing wrong is good. We must have a nuanced view of history because nothing is black and white. Was Stalin a comrade? Yes, was he some idol that we should try our hardest to emulate? Fuck no, even he decried idol worship, this is a struggle of the proletariat not of 'great men', may we learn from all parts of their experience, their mistakes and their successes.