The harshness of the Communists' initial policies created great dissatisfaction with the Soviet government. Red Army men moved into villages and seized grain from the peasants to feed soldiers and townspeople, but the new government proved unable to alleviate the shortages of food and fuel, caused by the Menshevik Georgian blockade of Armenia. The hope that the Red Army would drive out the Turks proved illusionary. Bolshevik Russia viewed the Turkish Nationalists as allies against Western imperialism and was reluctant to challenge them in Armenia.
An early Soviet historian, Bagrat Borian, wrote candidly about the economic terror of the first Soviet Armenian government: "The Revolutionary Committee started a series of indiscriminate seizures and confiscations, without regard to class, and without taking into account the general economic and psychological state of the peasantry. Devoid of revolutionary planning, and executed with needless brutality, these confiscations were unorganised and promiscuous. Unattended by disciplinary machinery, without preliminary propaganda or enlightenment, and with utter disregard of the country's unusually distressing condition, the Revolutionary Committee issued its orders nationalising food supply of the cities and the peasantry. With amazing recklessness and unconcern, they seized and nationalised everything – military uniforms, artisans tools, rice mills, water mills, barbers' implements, beehives, linen, household furniture, and livestock." 94
In January 1921, the Communists rounded up and exiled 560 Armenian army officers, including General Tovmas Nazarbekian (Foma Nazarbekov) and General Movses Silikian. General Dro was "invited" to go to Moscow. The next month Hovhannes Kachaznouni, the former prime minister of independent Armenia who had stayed behind in Yerevan, was arrested and placed in Cheka prison. But he remained their only eight days. When the Red Army marched out of Armenia to overthrow the Mensheviks in Georgia in February 1921, Dashnak leaders saw their opportunity to rid themselves of the hated Communist regime. The initial Dashnakist resistance to Soviet rule was outside the capital, in Zangezour, and in the contested mountainous region of Karabakh, led by the Bulgarian Armenian colonel Garegin Nzhdeh. On the morning of the February 18, Dashnak insurgents entered Yerevan, driving the Communists before them. The Bolsheviks made their last stand at the railroad station, and at noon an armoured train carried them from the city toward Nakhichevan in defeat. The Red Army, busy sovietising Georgia, was unable to come to their rescue.
The new government was headed by Simon Vratsian, who appealed to the West to aid the new Armenia. Armenians fought Armenians for the next few months, with Russian troops shelling Yerevan. When the Cheka prisons were opened, a scene of horror greeted the liberators. Seventy-five bodies were discovered, hacked by axes. Among the dead were the Dashnakist heroes, Hamazasp (Srvandztian) and Colonel Dmitri Korganov, shot February 1, 1921. The Dashnakists responded by arresting Bolsheviks, some of whom were subsequently killed. Having subdued Georgia, the Red Army returned to Armenia, overcoming the resistance of the Dashnakist forces. The Soviet troops entered Yerevan on April 2. The Dashnaks and thousands of civilians fled into the mountains of Zangezour where they held out until July.
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