Stalin's purges and famine are close to home for me. My grandparents were Volga Germans who recognized in the mid 00s how things were heading and came to the US. Their oldest was born in Russia and the rest of their children in the US. They knew they would be Socialists' targets because they were land owners, who employed people, and were ethnic Germans ... living in the Ukraine. Some of my great uncles were serving in the Russian army, and stayed in Russia. They had duties other than the front in WW1, and survived the turmoil of the two 1917 revolutions. BUt they stopped replying to mail in the late 20s whether they were shot, sent to the Gulags, or starved in the Holodomor, whether they were purged as "kulaks", "formers", or as ethnic Germans (or just died of starvation), those things my grandparents never learned about their brothers.
Though these great uncles are but a vague family story for me - they were gone long before I was born and I was too young and clueless to have the sense to ask my one yet living grandparent for more details about them - the horrors of Gulag Archipelago and Harvest of Sorrow have a family aspect for me.
The estimated numbers for the Holodomor range from 2.5 to 10 million. Like the Gulags, the Soviets probably didn't keep records, so I'll go with 5-10 million as an estimate, and if someone wants to quibble and minimize the number, I'll just ask them to produce the records underlying their minimization. The estimate I've seen for deaths in those years in the rest of the USSR is 800 thousand, about 1/5 as many in the Ukraine alone.
Stalin and his successors saw collectivization as a means to gain efficiency and productivity from the economies of scale. What they refused to see was that by those working on the kolkhozes having no ownership of the land and its produce, they had nothing to motivate them to be efficient and productive. As a consequence, they were not productive and didn't take great care of the motorized equipment they didn't own. Killing off the "kulaks" - the most productive, most energetic, and smartest - didn't help productivity, either.