The difference between the Stalinist and Tsarist Ruᛋᛋia is only in the latter being less bureaucratic about recording its crimes. Were the Tsarist régime recording its victims, Stalin and his henchmen would look like pure infants that have accidentally committed a couple misdemeanours.
The failure to understand that makes one fail to understand the proper scope, function and role of terror in the Ruᛋᛋian history of the XX century.
The Stalinist policies targeted targeted on the peasants bear a striking resemblance to Stolypin's internal policies of the earlier time.
Only in this case the brutality was more or less documented and formalised: the dead were more or less counted, the famine could be seen by those who would never get that far in the 1900s and so on.
This is not to say that Stalin was not a criminal, whose policies killed millions. This is to show why the policies of famine and mass incarceration were not met with an uprising by the people of the country: the very level of violence to which the average Ruᛋᛋian citizen had been hitherto exposed was quite similar to what befell USSR in 1930s.