Creating a Food Base around the Industrial Centers of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War

The article examines the process of creating a suburban agricultural zone around the industrial centers of the Soviet Union at the final stage of the Great Patriotic War, based on the materials of declassified resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR. It is shown that the purpose of this direction of the agrarian policy of the USSR was to provide the population of industrial centers with potatoes, vegetables and dairy products. This required a change in the specialization of agricultural enterprises assigned to the suburban zone, which in those conditions it was not possible to do without the help of the state. Therefore, in 1944-1945 by the resolutions of the Soviet government, in a number of industrially developed republics and regions of the country, the mobilization of labor from collective farms to industry, construction and transport was prohibited, the debt of previous years on mandatory supplies was written off from agricultural enterprises, part of the land unsuitable for economic use was excluded from taxation, etc. Since 1945 in order to stimulate the production of potatoes, vegetables and root crops for the collective farms of the suburban zone, it was allowed to reduce the norms of mandatory grain supplies. As a result, milk production has significantly increased in a number of industrialized republics and regions of the country, such as the Bashkir ASSR, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk and Chkalov regions, potato and vegetable crops have grown, which has improved the nutrition of the urban population.

The Great Patriotic War, the SNK of the USSR, large industrial centers, urban population, food base