Well, the article misses just a couple of things:
1) First and foremost, the famine was USSR-wide and hit both RSFSR and Kazakhstan, the latter one had even worse population consequences.
2) When it became apparent that there is not enough grain, USSR started rapidly importing it and giving out - still in a brutal city-favouring way, but it was not a deliberate politics of starvation.
3) The whole story started due to western nations banning gold trade with the USSR, forcing it to gamble on grain yields to buy equipment for industrialisation<p>The famine still was a terrible mistake, but trying to paint it as deliberate killing is unfair -- it is more akin to great depression (typical forced move to the city and machine agriculture). Except it didn't last 10 years and they tried to fix it as soon as it happened.
Recently I've been reading Vasily Grossman's <i>A Writer At War</i>, which is a collection of his journals from the Eastern Front, and the depths of Stalin's brutality are staggering. In the Battle of Stalingrad he forbade that any citizens flee the city since he thought it would motivate the troops, and special battalions were set up behind the front line to shoot any who retreated. In the battle itself Soviet snipers targeted the German water carriers, and so the Germans bribed children with food to fetch water for them, who were promptly shot since any collaboration with the enemy was punished with death.
If anyone is interested in learning more about this, I’d recommend the book “The Bloodlands”. It talks about the atrocities Stalin and Hitler did leading up to WW2.<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6572270-bloodlands" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6572270-bloodlands</a>