I used the search bar and the FAQ and the questions on this topic aren't addressing what I'm trying to figure out.

I recently heard a take on the Holodomor, admittedly from people that would be considered more or less Soviet apologists (aka Tankies) that the famine was mostly a product of Western propaganda. They claim that the primary sources from the time are deeply flawed, that photos from other events were used as evidence, that accounts from people that weren't in Ukraine at the time were overly relied upon and that one of the main accounts cited by historians was admitted to be embellished by its author.

They make further claims are that the reported number of victims doesn't add up, that the estimates used to gauge the number of deaths are not derived from any scientific methods and that WWI, the Civil War and Soviet reclassification of ethnic groups accounts for the dip in the number of "Ukrainians."

Most damningly, they claim that William Randolph Hearst (who they claim was sympathetic to fascism and well known for "Yellow Journalism" in the run up to the Spanish-American War) was deliberately sensationalist in his coverage of the USSR and largely responsible for pushing the narrative of the Famine in the Western press.

Their final point was also that the story of the Holodomor was generally accepted as embellished or fabricated until the beginning of the Cold War when it was resurrected as a way to tarnish the USSR and placate a number of far-right Ukrainian nationalists that had received asylum in the West.

Help me out /r/AskHistorians. Some of this reminds me of the ridiculous conspiracy theories that surround Holocaust denialism. But, I also know that Western countries were not above pushing narratives that might be less than truthful as part of Cold War propaganda.

So what gives? What really happened in Ukraine and how do we know? What was the impression of it at the time? What sources are reliable? Which are somewhat biased and which can we right off completely?