Economist Michael Ellman claims that the hands of the state could have fed all those who died of starvation.
[1] He argues that had the policies of the Soviet regime been different, there might have been no famine at all or a much smaller one.
[1][1] Ellman claims that the famine resulted in an estimated 1 to 1.5 million lives in addition to secondary population losses due to reduced fertility.
[1] However, Russian historians reject such claims.
Professor of History S. Kulchitsky asserts that the famine of 1946-1947 had a death toll in Ukraine that numbered in "the tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands, and certainly not in the millions".