Communism

I don’t trust the statistics of a state that let millions inhabitants starve to death.

They didn't "let" millions of inhabitants starve to death, they did everything they could to alleviate it. Russia was notorious for frequent famine and starvation prior to collectivization of agriculture, and ended famine once and for all once it had. That's a major contributor to the doubling of life expectancies in Russia:

Moreover, contemporary historians rely on statistics provided by the soviets, fact-check them, and find them to be very reliable.

How exactly was the normal worker in control of production? Wasn’t it more like production was in the hand of the state, which in fact was very hierarchical?

As I explained earlier, and will copy again, the state was run by the working classes. Socialism is not the absence of hierarchy, you're thinking of anarchism. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action (as I'll show at the end). Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.

Several elections which I attended will show concretely how soviet democracy functions. Four election meetings were held simultaneously in different hamlets of Gulin village, which had no assembly hall big enough for all. One of these meetings threw out the Party candidate, Borisov, because they felt that he neglected their instructions; they elected a non-Party woman who had displayed energy in improving the village and were praised by the election commissioner—himself a Party member—for having discovered good government timber which the Party had neglected. The central meeting in Gulin expected 235 voters; 227 appeared and were duly checked off by name at the door. There ensued personal discussion of every one of nine candidates, of whom seven were chosen. Mihailov “did good work on the roads.” The most enthusiasm developed over Menshina, a woman who “does everything assigned her energetically; checks farm property, tests seeds, collects state loans.” Dr. Sharkova, head of the Mothers’ Consultation, was pushed by the women: “We need a sanitary expert to clean up our village.” The incoming soviet was instructed to “increase harvest yield within two years to thirty bushels per acre, to organize a stud farm, get electricity and radio for every home, organize adult education courses, football and skiing teams, and satisfy a score of other needs.

• Anna Louise Strong

All in all, the version of the Soviet Union that exists in your head is a work of fiction.