Excerpts from the book Red Famine–The Kulaks

Once identified as enemies and robbed of their possessions, the kulaks met a variety of fates. Some were allowed to stay in their villages, where they were given the worst and most inaccessible land. If they continued to refuse to join the collective farm, they often had their tools confiscated, as well as their livestock. They were called names such as odnoosibnyk, or singleton, which eventually became insults. When famine struck later on, they were often the first to die.

To keep them away from their friends and neighbours, some kulaksl were given plots of land in other parts of the country, or even in the same districts but distant from their old farms and with worse soil. Henrikh Pidvysotsky's family was sent to the Urals: "We lived there for one summer and spent almost the entire fall walking back on foot." A Ukrainian government order in late 1930 commanded kulaks to be expropriated and moved to "the farthest away and least comfortable” land inside the republic.

To avoid that fate many escaped. In a few cases neighbours or local officials helped them to sell their property, or even quietly gave some of it back to ease their journey. Those who could do so made their way to cities. Some 10 million peasants entered the Soviet industrial workforce in the years 1928—32; many, perhaps most, were forced or persuaded to do so by collectivization and de-kulakization. Whereas unemployment had been a problem in some cities just a year or two earlier, factories scrambling to meet their Five Year Plan targets in 1930 were desperate for workers, and not as concerned by their social origins as they were meant to be.

Source: Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017) by Anne Applebaum.