The official explanation – seconded, until quite recently, by standard Western textbooks – was that collectivisation was a painful but necessary step towards modernising the rural economy, the famine something obdurate peasants brought upon themselves.
I can confirm this. My secondary education textbooks on the Soviet Union were focussed on the industrial progress of the Five year plans and the human cost was downplayed or explained a way as the result of Stalin's paranoia either of foreigners or Soviet people.
