golodomor wasn't exclusively Ukrainian plight. Though, it was Stalin's agricultural administration fuck up, that hunger was from Ukraine to Kazakhstan. Entire Povolzhie was affected. What you describing is something called in certain parts of RuNet as hoholdomor. Slav version of 6 gorrilions.
Stalin's push for squeezing as much grain for export(As this was needed to build up Soviet industry), partially made this matter.
And in this case he did it on false data.
And then the first reaction to the famine from local authorities was to hide it from central ones and still try to fill a grain collection quotas by literally robbing the countryside further didn't help matters.
By the time the central government knew what was going on shit hit the fan big time. Further matters didn't help by Soviet leadership feared that if extent of the famine would be known in the West it would be seen as weakness and direct aggression by the west would follow.
Nor had the Soviet leadership any fucking idea what to do. They used reserve grain funds to a small degree improve the situation. But ultimately that was drop in a bucket. There were few other relieve aid. But that one was the main one.
The other part of the 1932-33 famine you can blame on the natural drought that hit Ukraine, southern Russia and northern Kazakhstan.
And then of course there were the kulaks. Despite popular believe, Kulaks weren't peasant farmers. Kulaks were "rich" landowners. And this shitbags were responsible for quite a lot of famines in the Russians empire.
Don't think of them as later era British land owners who becoming wealthy through adoption of new technology and being more productive. Kulaks kept the Russian peasants/farmers in a vile conditions, obsolete and very inefficient institution.
When Stalin started doing forced collectivization. Kulaks not wanting to loose their power and out of spite prohibited peasants farmers from working the fields and even killed their own animals for hem not to go to into collectivization. Among other things.
Which did not help matters again.
The peasant/farmer culture by the way itself generally was not hostile to Stalin collectivization. Which itself came about because you couldn't really give peasant farmers plots of land and expect them to modernize and manage themselves. Because well most couldn't read or write neverminded do math. And the agricultural level in Soviet Union was at medieval stage curtesy of Kulaks. and the authorities of the Russian Empire.
BTW, under the New Economic Policy the Soviet leadership and Kulaks were supposed to reach out broker a deal and understanding, Didn't happen
After failure of NEP. Collectivization followed. Collectivization might have looked good on paper compared to the previous setup.
However due to insufficient resources (Both funds and skill). Generally collectivization didn't produce much better results for Soviet agriculture then under Kulaks. (It took after the war for that. Which into the 60's they should have decollectivized. ) Soviet central government assumed that it did and local authorities reported as such.
Anyway
By the way the fact that there are historians that think that Hoholdomor was done on purpose especially to kill the kulaks are frankly fucking stupid.
Why the fuck would you starve millions of people of whom a very tiny minority are kulaks. If Stalin wanted to crush kulaks he could do it in more direct and efficient manner by shooting them in the head , shipping them of to Siberia. Which in fact what was done
Why starve your support base ? Heck, kulaks among all peasants were in the best position to actually survive the starvation.
