The famine still was a terrible mistake, but trying to paint it as deliberate killing is unfair -- it is more akin to great depression (typical forced move to the city and machine agriculture). Except it didn't last 10 years and they tried to fix it as soon as it happened.
Ukraine has one of the most fertile soil on the planet and has had developed agrarian culture. Creating a famine in such place requires malice.
And the last point you make is completely ridiculous: "well, it wasn't happening for 10 years, so it's just an innocent mistake" - it was happening for 2 years and 3.5 million people died in Ukraine. How about that for a mistake? If 1000 died and they stopped it, I would agree. Or maybe 10000. Ok, 100,000 hungry deaths you cannot ignore, but 3.5 million people?! It was intentional and it was a genocide of Ukrainians.
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.
This is what disillusioned leftists who saw it first hand (like George Orwell) with the USSR
See 2:30 of following clip https://youtu.be/L8fWp-i-BGA
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
10's of millions starved to death.
