I do not venture in what is and isn't genocide. The legal definition and common use and so on. I don't know.

My point is that it is not primarily target towards ethnicity. It was certainty targeted towards Kulak's and of course, Ukraine had a productive land and thus a fair number of 'Kulaks'. The typical translation that is most often repeated in Stalin writing and the 'party line' was 'taking a class approach'.

What I dislike is the Ukrainian nationalist attempt to own the history. The same policy hit other ethnic groups just as hard. The Kazakh population was probably more effected in terms of %.

A huge amount of ethnically Russian farmer died as well, and they often get no mention in discussions of this.

I has become fashionable to portray it as a Ukrainian tragedy, rather then a Eurasian tragedy. It effect people between Moldova, Omsk and Arkhangelsk and beyond.

The most powerful version of that is Red Famine by Anne Applebaum. And that book as a pretty clear focus on Ukraine and a political message for the current situation for Western audiences. Ukrainian nationalism has been trying to use the Holodomor in the same way Israel does with the Holocaust, it gives it the permenent victim role and the moral high ground. She her self of course is a political commentator on those matters and her husband is politically active in trying to pull Ukraine into Europe. While here book does pay some small amount of attention to the other aspect and other victims, the overwhelming message is about Ukrainians suffering and overcoming basically intentional attempts at destruction of Ukraine and that is what the conversation around the book has universally focused on those aspects.

Steven Kotkin biography of Stalin that just came out spent a lot time at looking at the Presidential archives, meaning the archives of actual stuff on Stalin desk. With Stalin writing on it. Very often Stalin notes his responses directly on the reports he gets. And the overwhelming focus on that is showing how Stalin had on his desk lots of reports of starvation from all over the Soviet Union, his response a lot of focus getting his party to hit requisition quotas and that the reports about starvation were exaggerated or excuses by functionaries for failing to hit quotas. Very little is about 'lets plan a mass starvation because we are afraid of Ukrainian nationalism'. The overwhelming focus is on building and wielding a governmental machine to impose a new state dominate economic system on everybody, no matter the cost.

I have certainty not done an exhaustive study of all books and paper published on this topic in the last decade so your overall characterization of the debate might be accurate.

The term 'systematic starvation' implies that starvation was the goal. This is not the case in my opinion. The Soviet certainty expected economic disruption and people like Alexei Rykov (2nd most powerful guy in the Soviet Union) opposed the collectivization on those grounds. However even in Rykov worst prediction fell well short of what was actually required to push this all the way to the end. Their reports don't say 'great success, mass starvation achieved', they actually believed their own propaganda about how collective farms would be far more efficient and so on.

The difference seem to me that Soviets are willing to tolerate starvation to achieve their goals, not that they deliberately engineered starvation to achieve their goals. And their primary goals were not targeting Ukrainian nationalism.

All in all, its a difficult topic and has been used as a political weapon before it even started so its of course a minefield.