Hey ML? tell me about this thing called the Holodomor
so there's two things going on here; the denial that the holodomor didn't happen - absolute nonsense, anyone shouting this has gone full stalinite and you should ignore them completely
and the acceptance that the holodomor happened but was not a planned genocide. this can be argued about
i lean towards no it wasn't. if you're drawing direct parallels to the holocaust this doesn't really work as the holocaust was an industrially planned genocide
by contrast the 1932-1933 famines in USSR, ukraine & kazakstan were naturally occuring events that were made infinitely worse by stalin's utter clown show(s) re. program of forced collectivisation & unreasonable harvest demands/requisitions, petty nationalism/chauvinism when it came to sending aid and a general unwillingness to actually admit there was a problem that needed fixing
kazakstan & ukraine were both hit far worse than the USSR, due to the 'priorities' of stalin & his government
so i see the 1932-1933 famines as disasters that were massively exacerbated by man-made factors, to the point of utter ineptitude, that it became an extremely easy to spin narrative for the nazis and ukrainian fascists; 'look at the communist monsters starving millions of their people!
you also have to remember that the holocaust was discovered and well documented from right after the end of world war 2. then you add in the nurnberg trials; the evidence and scale of it has been out in the open for decades
conversely, soviet archives weren't opened up until..1990s? might have even been the 2000s, forget the exact date. so there is a massive difference in time there which shaped perceptions as well
people simply did not know (clearly) what was happening or had happened in the USSR under stalin (or indeed khrushchev, brezhnev etc). you had the official party line and we all know how reliable that is /s
so yes, the holodomor happened. this is fact. the only thing worth debating about it is whether stalin and the USSR government deliberately set out to murder millions of ukrainians, soviet citizens & kazaks
as i said, i lean towards no, because i don't see intentional planning to massacre millions. you can't plan for a famine obviously
you can plan to mitigate the effects of it as best as possible, and because of that i do see fucking incompetence & rampant chauvinism from stalin & disgusting authoritarianism by the government, that led to millions of deaths with no apology or recognition even now
however, since you've mentioned genocide; with regards to the kulaks, or the mass deportations of ethnic groups to siberia etc. this is much more straight forward and clear cut i'd say
those were programs to ethinically cleanse groups in society for not fitting the prefered ideal of stalin/the government, either deliberately or accidentally, should some tragic fate befall them on a long arduous journey etc
So this is a great question, and the answer in the case of the Holodomor is: it's complicated.
First, it helps to review what the legal definition of genocide is, at least according to the 1948 United Nations Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:
"Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Now a couple things to say about the UN definition: there is a heavy focus on intent, meaning that for an act to qualify as genocide (as opposed to "merely" a crime against humanity), there has to be an intention to wipe out a national/ethnic/religious/racial group. There are arguments that this bar (largely set by the Holocaust) is too high. It's also worth noting that the 1948 UN language was determined with Soviet input, and so by definition the language approved by the Soviet government intentionally was designed to not immediately put them in legal issues (even though the person who coined the phrase, Rafael Lemkin, specifically had the mass deaths in Ukraine in mind). It's also important to note that there are other concepts of what concepts a genocide, notably "cultural genocide", as discussed in this excellent AskHistorians Podcast episode.
Olga Andriewsky wrote an excellent literature review in 2015 for East/West: A Journal of Ukrainian Studies on the historiography of studying the Holodomor, so I'm going to lean heavily on that for this part of the answer. She notes that the conclusions of James Mace in his U.S. Commission’s Report to Congress in April 1988 hold up pretty well. She notes that all Ukrainian presidents (except for Yanukovich), favored official commemoration and historic of the Holodomor as a planned genocide, going back to Ukraine's first president, Leonid Kravchuk (who was Ukrainian Supreme Soviet Chairman and a longtime Communist Party member, so hardly some sort of anti-Soviet political dissident). "Holodomor as genocide" has effectively been the Ukrainian government's position since independence, as well as the position of many (not all) Ukrainian historians. Further research since 1991 that they feel has buttressed that view is that forced grain requisitions by the Soviet government involved collective punishment ("blacklisting", which was essentially blockading) of noncomplying villages, the sealing of the Ukrainian SSR's borders in 1932 to prevent famine refugees from leaving, and Stalin ignoring and overriding Ukrainian Communist Party requests for famine relief, and mass purges of the same party leaders as "counter-revolutionary" elements in the same year. Andriewsky notes that while some prominent Ukrainian historians, such as Valerii Soldatenko, dispute the use of the term genocide, they are in agreement with the proponents around the basic timeline, number of victims, and centrality of Soviet government policy - the debate is largely around intent.
So more or less open-and-shut, right? Well, not so fast, because now we should bring in the perspective from Russian and Soviet historians. Again, they will not differ drastically from Holodomor historians on the number of victims or the centrality of government policies (no serious historians will argue that it was a famine caused by natural factors alone), nor will they deny that Ukraine suffered heavily.
But their context and point of view will differ tremendously from Ukrainian Holodomor historians in that they will note that the 1931-1933 famine was not limited to Ukraine, but also affected the Russian Central Black Earth region, Volga Valley, North Caucasus, and Kazakhstan. This map from page xxii in Stephen Kotkin's Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 will give some sense of the geographic extent of the famine. In fact, while most of the famine victims were in Ukraine (some 3.5 million out of a population of 33 million), some 5-7 million died from the famine across the Union, and Ukraine was not the worst hit republic in relative terms - that misfortune befell Kazakhstan (then the Kazakh ASSR), where some 1.2 to 1.4 million of the over 4 million ethnic Kazakh population died through "denomadization" and the resulting famine. At least ten million people across the Union suffered severe malnutrition and starvation without dying, and food was scarce even in major cities like Leningrad and Moscow (although on the other hand, they did not face mass mortality). Kotkin very clearly states: "there was no 'Ukrainian' famine; the famine was Soviet."
Other factors tend to mitigate the idea that it was a planned attempt to specifically wipe out the Ukrainians as a people - the Ukrainian borders with Russia were sealed, but this came in the same period where internal passports were introduced across the USSR in an effort to control rural emigration into cities (many of these were kulaks and famine refugees), and deny them urban services and rations.
Stephen Wheatcroft and Michael Ellman are two historians worth mentioning here, notably because they had a public debate about a decade ago around how much Stalin knew and intended as consequences during the famine. Wheatcroft argued that, in effect, the mass deaths caused by forced grain requisitions were the result of governmental callousness: unrealistic requisitions were set, including the punitive collection of seed grain in 1932. But in Wheatcroft et al's opinion, this wasn't specifically meant to punish peasants. Essentially, extremely flawed grain reserves policies (plus the elimination of any private market for grain) meant that millions of lives were lost. Ellman, in contrast, takes a harder line: that Stalin considered peasants claiming starvation to be "wreckers" more or less conducting a "go-slow" strike against the government, and also notes Stalin's refusal to accept international famine relief (which was markedly different from Russian famines in 1891 or 1921-22). But Wheatcroft and Ellman, for their disagreement, do agree that the famine wasn't an engineered attempt to deliberately cause mass deaths - it was an attempt to extract grain reserves from the peasantry for foreign export and for feeding urban industrial workers.
Ellman comes down on the position that the famine isn't a genocide according to the UN definition, but is in a more relaxed definition. Specifically he cites the de-Ukrainianization of the Kuban region in the North Caucasus as an example of cultural genocide. But even here he notes that while under a relaxed definition the Holodomor would be a genocide, it would only be one of others (including the famine in Kazakhstan, which I wrote about in this answer and I think has a stronger claim to the genocide label than the Holodomor, as well as the mass deportations and executions in various "national operations". He also notes that the relaxed definition would see plenty of other states, such as the UK, US, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, similarly guilty of genocides, and in the case of Australia he considers even the strict UN definition to be applicable. Which would make the Holodomor a crime of genocide, but in a definition that recognizes genocide as depressingly common and not unique to the Soviet experience.