This is an answer that I wrote recently on the question of the intentionality of the 30s famines in the Soviet Union.

The long and short being that 1) the famines were caused by government policies, 2) a few million people starved to death in those famines (most historians nowadays put the number around 5 to 6 million deaths) 3) those policies were not explicitly implemented in order to kill millions of people, and yet 4) the Soviet government, especially at its highest levels, didn't particularly care that so many people died in these famines, and saw political benefits in them.

R.W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, and Michael Ellman had a long academic debate on the intentionality of the famines, and its worth reading through their arguments and rebuttals. They do share a lot of common ground though - it seems very similar to the functionalist v. intentionalist debate over Nazi Germany, to be honest.