In late 1929 and early 1930 workers and students were sent from the cities into villages to force peasants to form collective farms (kolntesutyounner in Armenian, kolkhozy in Russian). Where the workers failed or were resisted, police and soldiers intervened. Those better-off peasants, considered "kulaki" (fists in Russian), were thrown off their land and exiled either to inferior lands or to Siberia. Peasants resisted by killing off their livestock rather than surrendering them to the collectives. From 1928 to 1933 Armenia lost 300,000 head of cattle and over 500,000 sheep and goats. In some places armed bands were formed to fight off the intruders, but resistance proved futile. On paper at least it seemed as if peasant households were being collectivised. Whereas in December 1929 only 3.9 percent of Armenian peasant households were in the collective farms, by early February 1930 that figure had risen to 65.5 percent. Obviously this process has not been voluntary. Rather, physical threats and actual violence had compelled peasants to join the collective farms.
Suddenly, on March 2, 1930, just as peasant resistance throughout the Soviet Union was spreading, Stalin himself intervened in the rural revolution. He published an article, "Dizziness from Success", in which he condemned local authorities for forcing peasants into the collectives. By this move he brought the pell-mell collectivisation to a temporary halt and shifted the blame for the excesses in the countryside from the top leaders onto local officials. Immediately peasants began leaving the unpopular collectives. By April 1, 1930, 25 percent of peasant households were still in the collectives in Armenia, and by August the number had dropped to under 10 percent. The Armenian Communist Party was forced to admit that it had acted to precipitously in pushing peasants toward socialist agriculture and in the process had allowed "kulak and Dashnak elements" to turn the anti-collectivisation movement into an anti-Soviet campaign. Only gradually, in the fall of 1930, was the collectivisation drive renewed, this time at a more moderate pace. Nevertheless, resistance flared up in several districts. In Daralagiaz the party organisation itself came out against collectivisation and sided with the peasants. Such rebellion was not tolerated, and in 1932 Russian troops were brought in to crush the resistance. By the end of that year about 38 percent of peasant households in Armenia were collectivised. By the end of the decade almost all Armenian peasants were working in either collective or state farms.
Collectivisation was a profoundly revolutionary change for the majority of the Armenian population. Once and for all, it ended independent private farming. Peasants lost control over their own household economy and became producers for the state procurement agencies. The Communist Party increased its political hold over the peasants and created the instruments with which it could extract by force and heavy taxation the grain needed for cities and workers. Village headmen (tanuter), who had been the traditional leaders of rural society, were now treated as kulaki and exiled from their homes. Peasants became a second-class social group in Soviet society – not included in the social security system, underpaid for their produce and labour, and regarded as a backward element. After 1932 when internal passports were issued for urban dwellers in the USSR, peasants were not given the precious documents and therefore could not freely leave the collectives. Yet they thwarted the law, and thousands of villagers left the countryside and migrated to the towns where they made up the greater part of the expanding industrial labour force. Those who remained in the villages suffered enormously, though eventually the state allowed them the right to cultivate small household plots and to sell some of their output on collective farm markets.
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