The collective farms role in the years the Great Patriotic War. A.L. Strong’s view

The study is based on the book of the American journalist, Anna Louise Strong, Ph.D., "The Soviet Peasantry", which was published in English for the American reader in 1944. The author sympathized with the Soviet Union, considered Soviet agriculture not only new, but also advanced. A.L. Strong, relying on the materials of party documents and the press, as well as her own observations, examines the history of the creation of collective farms, their advantages over small individual farms. It shows how the potential of collective farms is revealed in wartime conditions, making it possible to resist threats and deprivations in an organized manner, find new reserves, and introduce effective management methods. The book of Anna Louise Strong reveals the positive impact of the collective way of life on the personal and professional growth of collective farmers, the increased standard of living of the villagers, the improvement of their working and rest conditions compared to pre-revolutionary ones, the growth of literacy and the emergence of middle- and higher-level specialists in agriculture. Examples of the heroic labor of collective farmers during the Great Patriotic War are given, overcoming difficulties is shown. The author assigns the main role in the restoration of the Soviet Union's agriculture, which suffered during the war years, to collective farms, based on averaged data for the USSR for various regions of the country. The analysis and conclusions of the American journalist are examined in the paper as an appendix to the situation in the Buryat-Mongolian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (BMASSR) during the Great Patriotic War.