I think the first thing to acknowledge here is that there is a lot of politically charged rhetoric around this issue because there is a lot a stake today when it comes to modern geopolitics when it comes to having something recognized as a genocide.

Most of the following information is pretty standard. A really good capsule summary of this information can be found in Ronald Grigor Suny’s The Soviet Experiment, which is a fairly standard textbook for undergraduate level Soviet history courses. In particular, his chapter “The Stalin Revolution” contains an excellent introduction to Stalinism, collectivization, industrialization and so forth. Some of the following narrative comes from this book.

The famine in Ukraine mirrored a general famine throughout the Soviet countryside. By the early 1930s the collectivization of Soviet agriculture was in full swing, and less centralized policies of the New Economic Policy were gone. Therefore, it’s impossible to talk about this topic without understanding Stalin’s transformational policies towards the Soviet economy. Stalin was interested in transforming the Soviet economy into a primarily industrial one and faced an enormous difficulty in doing so during the first Five Year Plan. One of the things that the Soviet government did to raise funds to help fund the plan was to requisition grain in large amounts and sell it abroad. The logic was that the money would then be used to help build industrial infrastructure. Collectivization also had other motivations that were important to the Soviet government. It was meant to modernize agriculture, which was still done in very traditional means well into the 1920s. It was meant to feed the cities more efficiently – the new industrial bases for the Soviet economy Stalin was building. And finally, not to be forgotten, there was a political motivation to reduce the power of the peasantry by bringing their economic life under the purview of the state.

There were a couple problems with this plan in the early 1930s. First of all, grain prices were pretty low already (globally). This meant that the income the policies generated was lower than it might have been, which motivated the government to requisition even more grain. The result was pretty catastrophic: people were starving (especially those in the countryside, but even in the cities there was food rationing during this period), while the Soviet Union was exporting grain to countries at low prices because the other countries didn’t really need it.

This was true across the Soviet Union, but Ukraine was a particularly important agricultural center for the Soviet Union. As you might expect, collectivization was carried out with particular ruthlessness there. Requisition amounts were very high (at least half some years). Insofar as Stalin and the Communists in Moscow were concerned, a place with such historically high output should have been able to provide more grain. The fact that they seemed unable meant that Stalin took them to be unwilling – and therefore suspect. This is one of the reasons the requisition numbers were set so high, and understanding that there was a political motivation, in particular an anti-communist motivation, for not supplying grain at the required levels. This played into early concerned with collectivization (that I already mentioned) about using collectivization of agriculture as a way of brining rural economic life under Soviet control. It is, I think, in this sense that genocide becomes a compelling narrative because it gives at least one specific political motivation for policies that resulted in a staggering number of deaths. There is not historical consensus here, and the Ukrainian population was not specifically targeted for reasons of ethnic cleansing. Nonetheless, there were politically motivated policies that were disproportionately aimed at Ukrainian peasants. Whether or not you feel compelled to call it genocide, Stalin’s policies no doubt resulted in millions of deaths in rural Ukraine.

Grain burning happened across the Soviet Union as a response to the excessive levels of requisitioning. It was the only kind of resistance the peasants could muster. Ukraine faced a disproportionate amount of deaths and the harshest policies, but it was not the only place that faced this sort of conflict with the Soviet government over collectivization. Precisely the same kind of thing was happening elsewhere. This is the evidence most frequently cited by those who think that Stalin’s role in the famine in Ukraine does not rise to the level of genocide – because the distinction here is really one of degree. In any event, grain burning was a response to grain requisition policies. I keep using the term grain requisitioning because that is what was going on. Although you can call it a tax, I think that is somewhat confusing. The fact of the matter is that Soviet officials were showing up to places where people were already literally starving and physically taking their only viable food source by force. It’s tax collection in a fashion, but this wasn’t a protest against simple harsh or excessive taxation. The collectors weren’t coming for money, they were coming, quite literally, for their food. It was in this context that they burned the grain. If you’re going to let us die of starvation by taking our food, we’d rather burn it so you can’t get your hands on it anyway. It was an act of desperation in a desperate moment.

So there can be no doubt that Stalin played an important and central role in the entire situation. Collectivization was an important part Stalin’s overall economic plan. As a result, the famine was no doubt caused by Stalin’s policies and allowed to continue in spite of the ample evidence of what was going on. Stalin didn’t sit down at some point and say “How can I kill millions of Ukrainians” as best I can tell. Nonetheless, his general policies were applied there in a specific fashion there that led to particularly horrific results. There can be no argument that Stalin himself didn’t have a great deal to do with what happened and allowing it to continue to happen.

Follow up: why did they burn their food and kill their livestock voluntarily?

Would you please clarify, from what you remember reading, the context in which Ukrainians voluntarily burned their food and killed their livestock? It would also help to know which Ukrainians were doing the burning--the farmers, the bosses within the soviet power structure, or the Ukrainian separatists.

On the one hand, if the food and livestock was slated to be transported out of Ukraine as part of the official policy from the Kremlin, then burning of that food does not contribute to Ukrainians starving, since it was never going to them in the first place.

On the other hand, if the policy was to take the food from all the farmers to a centralized location in Ukraine, and then redistribute it between Ukrainians, and it was the farmers doing the burning, then the act of destruction does contribute to starvation, but the reason is the protest of the policy. (This scenario isn't as unlikely as it sounds, if the "redistribution" part never happened to reach the farmers.)