JC: Stalin, as meglomanic as he was, had nothing to gain by deliberately wiping out so many people.

Absolutely he did, although it wasn't so much "genocide against the Ukrainian people" as "elimination of class enemies".

This is about as accurate as your comment that the Soviet people "idolised Stalin". There's a big difference between an enforced "cult of personality" and genuine idolising of someone.

There have been a number of attempts to portray the mass starvation of 1932-33 as "an accidental result of collectivisation" but they don't really hold water when you look at the announcement made by Stalin in 1929 that "the Kulaks will be liquidated as a class". Kulaks being that group of slightly better-off peasants who were able to feed themselves and produce a small surplus and thereby might be in a position to resist or ignore "building socialism in the countryside". Typically they'd have a couple of cows and maybe 10 acres of cultivatable land. Some had more, but that was typical. Hardly landlords!

In December 1929 Stalin announced: "Now we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against the kulaks, break their resistance, eliminate them as a class and replace their production with the production of kolkhozes and sovkhozes".

There was a resolution of 30th January 1930 "On Measures for The Elimination of Kulak Households in Districts of Comprehensive Collectivisation" which divided kulaks into 3 categories:

- to be shot or imprisoned on designation by the local security services
- to be deported(internal exile)after confiscation of property
- To be evicted from their smallholdings and used as forced labour in local gulags

Seed corn and seed potatoes were forcibly (and deliberately) confiscated in 1931/32, so it is hardly surprising that harvests suffered hugely in 1932/33.

Sounds pretty deliberate to me. Any unbiased thorough investigation of the period would be likely, IMO, to arrive at a similar conclusion.