That doesn't sound very convincing - after all people didn't starve before Russia had modern farming equipment. Something else must have changed. The invention of modern farming equipment is unlikely to have caused existing farming methods to become less effective.

Also, it seems unlikely to me that Soviet planning relied on buying farming equipment from the USA. Weren't they rather too proud for that?

Did the USA also deny to sell them food?

Edit, since YC doesn't allow me to write more comments: yeah ok maybe people were starving before that, the point was, the US did not cause that. Maybe their superior technology could have helped, but that is not the same as blaming them for causing the famine. If the US hadn't invented those machines, Russians would have starved all the same, and there would have been no US to blame for it. That is what I meant.

As for trade embargoes, I am not a fan. But I can also not blame the US for wanting to curb the spread of communism, which is decidedly not a harmless ideology. So I guess trade embargoes tend to be a first step, preferred to actual war.

Also not convinced that communists would have loved to trade. Wasn't everything Western frowned upon? You could get into jail for listening to Jazz music? That doesn't sound very open minded to me, and not a good basis for trade. I think they wanted to show that they could do better than capitalism, and to rely on capitalist products would have been an admittance of failure.