As the name implies, the MTSs were rural agencies that supplied collective farms with agricultural machinery and people to run it. They were set up in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the kolkhozy were too weak and disorganized to manage their own equipment. Ideologically, collective farms were a "lesser" form of property (since theoretically they belonged to the collective rather than the state as a whole); hence it would not do to have them own part of the "means of production." Politically, the new collective farms, into which so many peasants were dragooned, were unreliable. So the MTS also served as a party (and police) stronghold in the countryside.〔Taubman, William. ''Khrushchev: The Man and His Era'' (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004: ISBN 978-0-393-32484-6), pp. 375-6.〕