Because by the point the Stalin can rely on his shiny new industrial base to as a means to raise capital, reducing the need to export grain.
ObsessedNuker, you seem to be misunderstanding just
what capital is.
Essentially, it can be said, capital is more or less money invested by a capitalist into production; Marx lays it out pretty well in his analysis of capitalism in
Capital: Volume I, wherein he distinguishes between three different kinds of capital: Constant, variable, and fictitious capital.
Wikipedia (for want of specific page numbers in Marx'
s Capital, that and its something that I can easily link to which gives the gist of Marx's three basic assertions) gives a pretty good account of the three main types of capital, which I'm simply paraphrasing from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_capital
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_capital
Constant capital is essentially money spent on fixed assets (the land, buildings, and machinery needed for the modern factory), raw materials needed for the process of production itself, and various other expenses incurred in the push to, say, build or buy a factory structure likewise placed on bought land, install the machinery with the assumed end goal of actually producing with the hopes of creating surplus value (profit)
Variable capital is more or less money spent on workers' labor power, which the capitalist needs in order to get the factory producing goods to sell (hopefully) at a profit in the market.
Finally, fictitious capital appears in the form of bonds, stock, and so forth.
Marx's analysis is pretty much up to snuff in terms of describing capitalism as he saw it in the middle half of the 19th century, basing his analysis off of classical economists such as Ricardo, Mill, and Adam Smith.
What, now, does that say about the Soviet planned economy?
Firstly, replace capitalists with state appointed bureaucrats - chiefly, in our case, the People's Commissariat for Food Supplies and another separate commissariat for Agriculture respectively, which jointly were responsible for the production of food by the collective farms needed to feed the growing urban proletariat/working-class in the wake of Stalin's drive to rapidly industrialize the USSR as to defend against potential (capitalist, later fascist) threats from abroad.
Not just those two commissariats but the NKVD as well (the Russian abbreviation for the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) I do believe played a role in reporting on peasants in relation to farming techniques, amount of grain produced locally for consumption on a family basis and any surplus grain meant for the state, etc.
Assuming that Stalin's goal was to simply kill off much of the peasant population (chiefly Ukraine's vast peasantry) by seizing grain used to feed peasant families, then agricultural production would undoubtedly suffer as less and less peasants means less and less grain - which is needed for exports and to feed the urban workers.
What good is this shiny new industrial base when grain required to feed increasing throngs of factory workers dries up once all of the grain needed for peasant families as food eventually dries up? Peasants that are starving won't be able to produce surplus grain, all of the grain taken away by the state needed for peasant family consumption being finite and gone once it is exported or sent to the cities.
Not to mention the fact that, with the elimination of markets and thus capitalists, both the collective farms and the factories functioned together to a certain extent; the state invested money into land, buildings, and inevitably machinery (all of which make up the so-called means of production) in place of individual capitalists, using variable capital to pay for workers' wages -the state, like the capitalists before it, utilized labor power of said workers whom it paid with a wage which is garnered from the assumed creation of profit or surplus value.
That shiny new industrial base Stalin constructed in turn provided farming implements such as tractors and various tools produced by factory machinery out of, say, various types of metal or raw materials.
In turn, the collective farms provided much needed grain to feed the urban workers and therefore sustain factory production day in and day out. Any extra grain not used as food for peasant families taken as a surplus from the peasantry as stipulated by law would consequently go to the cities and foreign countries as exports.
If the peasants consequently starve assuming that every last bit of grain needed to feed their families was seized forcibly by the state, agricultural production would slowly contract before grinding to a halt as less and less peasants (most of whom in your scenario would be starving) produce grain needed for the urban working-class and as exports.
If the grain needed as food for peasant families gradually dries up in the absence of surplus grain (that could only be produced by a well fed peasantry btw), less food is sent to the cities to feed the growing working-class - less and less food means at the very least more and more hungry workers.
With hungrier workers, production of, say, farming implements for the peasants suffers.
Thus, all of that constant as well as variable capital is either under underutilized potential wise or outright wasted as the factories fail to produce enough tractors, tools, and various other societal goods which henceforth would prevent the acquisition of much needed surplus value or profit by the state - without surplus value/profit, Stalin's 'shiny new industrial base' wouldn't be worth a dang thing as new and more factories would not be built, financed, etc. which means a stagnant industrial base that is incapable of expanding (this 'shiny new industrial base' doesn't just materialize, it needs money converted into capital by the Soviet state in place of capitalists to come into being first)
So no, starving the peasants wouldn't simply 'raise capital' and reduce the need for exports - rather and IMHO, creation of capital would decrease overtime as workers gradually begin to feel the effects of hunger from a lack of grain, which means both an inefficient workforce and quite possibly a complete halt in production as a whole.
No surplus value from under preforming factories or ones that shut down means an inability to build new factories needed to produce farm implements for the peasantry on the collective farms - this ultimately negative process as far as Stalin is concerned in this hypothetical scenario then winds up in a vicious cycle.
The entire economy-a planned, socialist economy at that-suffers greatly as a direct result.
My two cents.
Rant over.
