[pew_pew_]

1. Volga? 2. I can agree with that, which I pointed out by mentioning that cities (with industrial population) were favored. 3. It is true, but the exports were curtailed in an attempt to combat the famine. I made the mistake before freshening up on soviet foreign trade, which basically consisted of grain only. I can see why they exported it even during the famine -- without selling grain there would be no fuel, no spare parts, the whole economy would halt.

I didn't say that was an 'innocent mistake' -- mistakes can still be brutal and criminal, yet if it was a deliberate genocide of Ukrainians, tell me, why did 2 to 3 millions of Russians and the same amount of Kasakhs died?

And the point about comparison with the great depression is not about time, but about damage control -- in the case of great depression they did none, due to ideological reasons, while in the soviet case they did, although limited it.

It was more of a bureaucracy/management problem combined with Stalin's disregard of life: administration was trying to get the ridicilous KPIs (while manufacturing illicit statistics) at the cost of the people at hand.