Short answers, pulled from the story.
An official Soviet publication from the early 1920s estimated approximately five million deaths from famine and related disease, and that figure is most commonly cited. Other assessments ranged from one million on the low end to ten million on the high end.
The famine resulted from the combined effects of severe drought, the economic disruption of World War I and the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921, and the Bolshevik policy of war communism, particularly grain requisitioning (prodrazvyorstka), which caused peasants to drastically reduce crop production. A rail system too damaged to distribute food efficiently made conditions worse.
Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration (ARA) was the largest contributor to Russian famine relief, ultimately feeding more than ten million people daily and serving over 1.75 billion meals. Hoover secured approximately 78 million dollars for the effort, appointed Colonel William N. Haskell to lead the operation in Russia, and used 237 ships to deliver more than 912,000 tons of food.
Yes. The historian Orlando Figes documented thousands of reported cases of cannibalism, with many more unreported. In Samara, ten butcher shops were closed for selling human flesh. Organized gangs in the Volga region targeted children, and Figes estimated that a considerable proportion of meat in Soviet factories in the area was human flesh.
In a secret letter to the Politburo dated the 19th of March 1922, Lenin described the famine as an opportunity to seize Orthodox Church property. That year the Bolsheviks confiscated over 4.5 million golden roubles worth of church assets, directing one million gold roubles to famine relief. The historian Richard Pipes argued Lenin used the humanitarian crisis as a pretext to weaken the Church's influence over the peasantry.
The documentary film Hunger or Famine (Голод), directed by Tatyana Sorokina, premiered on the 24th of September 2022 at the Oktyabr cinema in Moscow. The Russian Ministry of Culture banned its distribution in Russia in November 2022. Despite the ban, the film received the monthly journalistic award from Redkollegia in December 2022 and won the Audience Prize at the 2023 Artdocfest.