> 7.5 million mainly Ukrainian Orthodox Christians who died from starvation due to Stalin’s policies of punishment in the 1930s

That number was spun during the Cold War along with the "manmade famine" myth. The modern demographics, which even the most politically conservative Ukrainian scholars accept, list about 2.5 million Ukrainians dying in a famine which killed about 4.5 million nation wide in the USSR in 1932-3.

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http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a713779166~db=all~order...

A new estimate of Ukrainian population losses during the crises of the 1930s and 1940s
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During the Cold War it used to be customary to charge either that the crop of 1932-3 was sufficient to feed most people and that the famine was deliberately created by Stalin or to claim that the famine was a consequence of the disruption of free enterprise. Both of these versions have been thoroughly discredited by the opening of the archives since 1991. Mark Tauger gives a lot of details on what the research in the archives has shown:

http://www.as.wvu.edu/history/Faculty/Tauger/soviet.htm

Of special significance are the items which can be downloaded at his page entitled "Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933" and "Statistical Falsification in the Soviet Union: A comparative Case Study of Projections, Biases, and Trust." The first gives a detailed account of the wave of natural disasters in this period, especially plant rust, which caused the massive crop failure and the second analyzes what the internal statistics show and how they differ from the published statistics.

What's ironic is that collectivization did improve Soviet agriculture, contrary to popular myth. People did have more to eat after collectivization than before. The problem in 1932-3 was not that collectivization itself was a bad idea but that plant rust can have the effect of allowing grain stalks to grow without carrying the expected number of grains in them. This set off a rumor that the crop had been fine and that somehow the deficit was the result of someone taking the crops away. West-Ukainian groups based in Poland spread the story that Stalin was taking the crops away to destroy Ukrainian nationalism (in fact the peasants in East-Ukraine which was then a part of the USSR didn't care much about Ukrainian nationalism, that was a movement based in the Polish-Ukraine). But Stalin in turn assumed that the mischief must have come from rich peasants, kulaks, hiding the food away in revolt against the government. The only measure which could have alleviated famine at that time was a massive importation of food from abroad, but no one appreciated that crop failure was the root cause of this.

Amartya Sen has repeated a lot of the same errors in an academic context. Peter Bowbrick's critique of Sen is significant for understanding many of the typical past errors which occurred in famines.

http://www.bowbrick.org.uk/famine.htm

Bowbrick focuses on the Bengal famine and shows how officials were in fact trying to follow exactly the policy which Sen claims they should have followed, but the results were negative. Bowbrick shows how Sen and the Bengal officials both played down the role of natural disaster in creating the famine and instead for a social cause, hence failed to address the root problem. Much of what Bowbrick says about Bengal and Sen could be transferred over to the errors made by Soviet officials in failing to appreciate the actual crop failure caused by plant disease.

But it should be noted that none of this comes close to the caricature picture still popular from Cold War times which alleged the root cause of the famine in 1932-3 was either a plan by Stalin to destroy Ukrainian nationalism or the result of abandoning the free market. Those myths have been debunked.