Those are buzzwords the capitalist world uses. Of course a primary agrarian society can have famines. It's not a surprise that an agrarian, semi-feudal society such as the USSR when the bolsheviks took power could suffer such a disaster. What they never tell you is that:

a) It was the last big famine that the USSR suffered in its history (after a long history of famines), after it the union of republics experienced tremendous growth and prosperity and famines were erradicated once and for all

b) Famines such as that were common in capitalist countries, like Ireland, and in colonies of capitalist countries, such as India. There, the british killed dozens of millions of people, maybe surpassing the famines in the USSR, and it was a conscicious policy of the british (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_famine_of_1899%E2%80%93...). Yet you never hear about how England is an abhorrent country that should be shamed and erradicated from this world. They killed far more people and it was a completely conscicious decision, but THEY are the ones to judge which famines we remember and which ones we forget.

Gulags: another western buzzword. The famous book that popularized the concept in the West was the "Gulag Archipielago", which has throughly debunked as a fabrication, made up from folk tales, oral testimonies without proof and just made up bullshit. Even wikipedia admits it:

"Natalya Reshetovskaya described her husband's book as "folklore", telling a newspaper in 1974 that "the subject of 'Gulag Archipelago,' as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps."" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago)

Yes, there were gulgas, but those were centers of detention, not death camps. The average prison length was around 5 years. And yes, prisons with forced labor are horrible, but America has them and they consider themselves to be the most "democratic" country in the world, right? There isn't any aspect of the gulags that is much different from what we have today in most democratic countries, yet they are singled out as an extraordinary fact, while Guantanamo Bay is just America being democratic and promoting freedom and stuff.

Finally, you have to remember that the Soviet Union was under extreme internal and external pressure to destroy communism and bring back the burgeois class to power. There were plenty of reactionary, anti-revolutionary spies, saboteours, nazis, fascists, tzarists and so on that wanted to destroy the revolution. How do you deal with that, if you want to preserve the revolution? Yes, a lot of innocent people were unjustly condemned (again, not too different from our current system), but you have to have prisons to deal with people (a lot of them nazis) who want to destroy communism and bring back capitalist exploitation.