The USSR didn't have the great depression, but they did have the HoloDomor or terror famine of Ukraine between 1932 and 1933 and the wider Soviet Famine of that period.
The history of the famine later went on to inspire the book Animal Farm and were a pure artifact of the central planning economy forcing the export of the very food required to feed millions of people.
Calling the famine an issue of erroneous data does a disservice to the victims. Millions of people don't starve while having their food confiscated at gun point due to an accounting error.
It's the proximate cause. As we all know it had horrible effects. Had the USSR been able to accurately measure food production it wouldn't have happened, so it is indeed the proximal cause.
The interesting thing about market economies is that the economy itself measures the food and distributes it in a maximally efficient manner when left unmolested, no central planner needed.
Distributed economies will always be more efficient than planned economies, because everyone on a distributed economy participates in the cognitive load of measuring and distributing resources, so the network has more processing power and less latency than a centrally planned economy.
Do you have a source that food was destroyed to prevent it's price cratering and that caused starvation? Usually if there's demand for food it's price won't crater, and the fact that people were starving tells me there was said demand.
Of course if that is the case that that happened, that's an external (government) intervention in a market.
Planning is distributed, in market economies. Central planning by definition cannot be distributed.
As for food being always produced in market economies, see the Bengal famine. Food wasn't destroyed in the Holodonor, it was simply redistributed. Similar famines happened under capitalism, all it takes is for a crop to come up first or for cash crops combined with the anarchy of production to lead to a crop that is beneath the requirements.
So no, similar famines did happen under capitalism, and your thesis is simply incorrect.
Markets can have latencies measuring in years or more, see the bullwhip effect. It's incorrect to say that they will be lo always have more processing power and less latency. They would if they were theoretically perfect, but markets are already at their limit and are not far away from the most primitive of planning.
Optimal does not mean perfect. Externalities exist. For example, a meteor could hit the great plains and cause a famine. The market cannot solve that, but it can optimize available resources.
Markets emerge spontaneously, like evolution. Evolution functions more optimally than if there were theoretically some god pulling levers. Not perfect, optimally. Markets function better than planned economies for the same reason, that the depth and dimension of the information needed real time does not allow for some entity to make the minutiae of the decisions that need to be made real time. Feedback loops in a complex dynamic multiparty system like a market or evolution sometimes do have much longer latency, but the mean latency of all information flows in both examples is vastly smaller than if every one of those flows had to go through a decision making entity first.
This used to be believed by academic historians, until the opening of the Soviet Archives in 1992, and now the consensus is that it wasn't, it was just really bad data.
The link you're citing had multiple authors resign due to academic dishonesty and is funded by the US government, therefore making it state propaganda.
It’s worth looking at primary sources for “Holodomor”, a depressing amount are from Ukrainian fascists.
The consensus among historians is that there was indeed a famine, one of the periodic environmental ones in the region. Planning was indeed slow to react to the famine and the sabotage by landlords, so food aid arrived late.
It was also the last famine in the region. The landlords that destroyed food were expropriated, land was collectivised and agriculture was industrialised. Talk to any older Ukrainians and they’ll tell you there was plenty of food throughout their lifetimes until the 90s after the USSR was defeated.
Which is exactly why "pen and paper" are an issue.