Collectivisation can be seen as a war by the state against the peasantry, and its effects reached far beyond agriculture. As a result of the mass migrations from the countryside, collectivisation aided in the creation of a new working class. But more ominously, the vast increase of party power and the expanded use of violence against the most numerous lass in the population created an atmosphere in which police rule became the norm in Soviet life. What had been used against the peasantry would soon be turned against the better-off people in society, particularly members of the Communist Party.
The 1930s was also a time of enthusiasm for the project of building socialism in one country, and Soviet propaganda effectively portrayed the USSR as the alternative to a worldwide capitalism suffering in the Great Depression and as the major bulwark against a growing fascist threat. As a result of the "Stalin Revolution" of the 1930s, Armenia became more industrial, more "proletarian". The number of workers in Armenia grew by 2.5 times in the 1930s, until they made up 31.2 percent of Armenia's population in 1939. By 1935 industry accounted for 62 percent of economic production. The years of industrialisation were a time of upward social mobility. Peasants became workers; many workers became foremen or managers; managers became party and state officials. But this new industrial society, in which quantities of output were emphasised at the expanse of quality of product or safety of workers, did not empower workers. Rather, Soviet-style "socialism" created a society in which the workers were politically powerless, trade unions were agencies for the state, and factory managers acting as "little Stalins" dominated the process of production.
The "Stalin Revolution" of the 1930s ended market relations in the Soviet Union – except for the collective farms' markets and illegal, underground "black markets". Along with the end of commercial transactions and the collapse of "state capitalism", the old merchant middle class was eliminated. The entire economy was put under state control; everything was nationalised; and this "command economy" was declared to be "socialism" in 1936. the original Marxist concept that under socialism the producers themselves would run the economy and society was buried under a mountain of rhetoric about capitalist encirclement, dangers from Fascist aggressors in central Europe, and "enemies of the people" at home. Stalin's ideologists argued that the closer the Soviet Union moved toward the classless society, the stronger the state would have to become in order to beat back the enemies of communism. Anyone who questioned these innovations in Marxist theory was considered disloyal, and all questioning of the official party line was punishable by imprisonment, exile, or even death. Under the Stalinist regime established in the 1930s the police became all-powerful, subjecting even loyal party members to torture and execution. Purges periodically cleaned the party and state apparatus of anyone who might be considered sceptical about the new order or its self-ordained leader.
The leadership of the Armenian Communist Party in the early 1930s was made up of loyal Stalinists. At the head of the party was Aghasi Khanjian (1901-1936), a young Communist born in Van. A Marxist from his young teenage years, Khanjian had worked in Leningrad in the 1920s, where he was involved in purging the local organisation of the anti-Stalinists. In 1928 he had been transferred to Yerevan and rose rapidly in the party ranks. One by one he removed the old Armenian Bolsheviks who had governed Armenia since the early 1920s. Khanjian benefited enormously from the patronage of Stalin, and in May 1930, at the age of twenty-nine, he was named first secretary of Armenian Communist Party. Though he presided over collectivisation (in its second phase), Khanjian achieved a degree of popularity and was seen by many as defender of the aspirations of the Armenians. But by the mid-1930s Khanjian had come into conflict with the most powerful party leader in Transcaucasia, Lavrenti Beria, a Georgian close to Stalin. Early in July 1936 Khanjian was called to Tbilisi. Suddenly and unexpectedly it was announced that the Armenian party chief had committed suicide. Though the circumstances of his death are murky, it is believed that Beria had ordered Khanjian's death to remove a threat to his own monopoly of power.
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