 Stalin blamed the famine on hostile elements and wreckers within the peasantry; his government provided small amounts of food to famine-struck rural areas, although this was wholly insufficient to deal with the levels of starvation.The Soviet government believed that food supplies should be prioritized for the urban workforce; for Stalin, the fate of Soviet industrialisation was far more important than the lives of the peasantry.Grain exports, which were a major means of Soviet payment for machinery, declined heavily.