Three of the most important Russian agrarian institutions are the subsistence household farm (personal auxiliary farm), the collective farm, and the district administration. Before collectivisation, the Russian peasant farms were primarily subsistence farms. Each peasant farm had two types of land plots: a farmstead plot and field plot(s). After 1917 the land belonged to the state but the village community possessed the land around the village and distributed and redistributed field plots between households according to the numbers of people in the family ('eaters'). Collectivisation did not totally liquidate subsistence peasant farms; it collectivised field plots and diminished the number of animals allowed for each household to a subsistence minimum. For most of the Russian peasant households, the number of personal animals kept by a family did not diminish because before collectivisation they kept just this subsistence minimum. Later, in order to underline the priority of the work on collectivised fields and auxiliary character of the work in household farms, the latter were called Personal Auxiliary Farms (PAF). Stalin started the mass collectivisation not exclusively for ideological reasons, but rather for a  pragmatic purpose of extracting resources from the countryside, which was primarily subsistence-oriented