Unafraid to Speak Out : Soviet Party Official Has Novel Ideas

Fedor T. Morgun, the Communist Party boss of a major farming district in the Ukraine, is a writer and trained agronomist, but he can be as earthy as any peasant.

So when farmers began to complain recently about a lack of state-supplied fertilizer, he urged them to make use of a common substitute. “For God’s sake,” he told party functionaries, “rivet the attention of specialists and everyone on the collection of cow dung.”

His lecture on the merits of manure, delivered to a somewhat surprised but sympathetic audience from a collective farm called Victory of Communism, illustrated his positive, do-it-yourself approach.

Avoids Typical Invective

Morgun, operating in the style made popular in the past year by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, has a habit of speaking his mind and avoiding the typical Soviet invective against the United States and its allies. And he has called for tripling or quadrupling the price of bread, which is the equivalent of an American politician campaigning against apple pie and motherhood.

In another departure from ideological principle, he expressed a wish that his own grandchildren could go to the United States and learn English to promote better understanding.

Morgun is no dissident. He is first secretary of the Communist Party in the Poltava region and a member of the Central Committee of the party for the entire Soviet Union. He is a strong Gorbachev supporter and will be a deputy to the 27th party congress scheduled to open in Moscow on Tuesday.

He expressed his unconventional opinions in an interview with two visiting American reporters, showing that he is much more open than most party officials.

In the past, this openness has sometimes put him into trouble. He recalled that he almost lost his party membership for advocating a new method of tilling the soil that upset the agricultural establishment.

‘Now He’s in Fashion’

“He was once held back because he was too outspoken, but now he’s in fashion,” a Soviet official from Moscow told the reporters on a trip organized by the Soviet Foreign Ministry.

Clearly, however, Morgun now fits Gorbachev’s job description for energetic, candid, results-oriented party leaders needed to revive the sluggish Soviet approach to work.

“We must be bolder in blazing new trails,” Morgun said. “Gorbachev understands the need to put managers on the spot and stop people from relying too much on government. You can’t plan everything from above.”

As first secretary of an oblast, or administrative sub-division, in the Ukraine, Morgun is literally at the grass-roots level, talking to farmers and milkmaids, tractor drivers and factory managers. Under the Soviet system, the party and not the government has ultimate power, so Morgun and the hundreds like him are both enforcers and enthusiastic cheerleaders for policies often decided by a handful of men in Moscow.

Morgun’s large, high-ceilinged office in Poltava reflects his role. He sits at a desk commanding a telephone console with dozens of buttons that connect him with subordinates in every part of the region. Like the chief executive of a capitalist corporation, he routinely puts in a 12-hour day and then takes work home with him. If he gets a spare hour on Sundays, he likes to ski cross-country with a friend, but work keeps him occupied about 60% of his leisure time.

Public Relations Skills

A youthful-looking 61, he has clearly developed political and public relations skills. Standing before a group of party faithful at the House of Culture in the village of Likhvitsy, he listened attentively to questions.

When a farmer complained about the poor design of buildings that let in the cold, Morgun recommended more use of wood stoves. And he disclosed that the Poltava region would be getting a new, efficient wood stove designed by a group of young Americans.

“It’s slightly costly--from 300 to 350 rubles ($400 to $470)--but it’s worth it in the long run,” he said. “So even the Americans, who have all the gas and oil in the world, are inventing better wood stoves.”

He welcomed a question about why horses are not used more on the farm.

“I like horses, and I like people who like horses,” he said. “I’d like to see one horse for every 10 households, for transportation and recreation. We have forgotten the horse and become too enchanted with thundering machinery.”

Too Many Cars

In his conversations, the back-to-nature theme is strong. He recalled that he pushed for a ban on motorboats on Poltava’s rivers, to preserve the environment. And he said he is upset because the city of 300,000 now has more than 200 private cars, a number he considers too high.

But the battle that is closest to Morgun’s heart is the one that he and others have waged for top-level acceptance of a method of farming that dispenses with the plow and replaces it with a wide-bladed wedge that prepares the ground without turning over the soil.

To Morgun, plowless farming is more productive, and it conserves precious topsoil in the rain-short Ukraine. But he said scientists and academics have opposed the new technique and have delayed its introduction despite the inferior crops from conventionally plowed fields.

When Gorbachev was minister of agriculture, Morgun said, he came to the Ukraine to see the new device and was “immediately converted, because he’s not a scientist.” Gorbachev has helped to get the new equipment delivered to farms in the Ukraine, and Morgun estimated that the conversion will be complete in five to eight years.

Resistance to the change, he said, has contributed to the Soviet Union’s poor grain harvests in recent years and forced it to buy wheat and corn from the United States and other countries.

‘Yes, We Are Ashamed’

“I feel deeply embarrassed that we have to buy grain abroad,” Morgun said. “Yes, we are ashamed, and I believe this is a very serious shortcoming. But Gorbachev is frankly mentioning this, and because it’s mentioned in public, things will change. We must sell grain and not buy it.”

On a related topic, he said the price of bread, subsidized by the government for decades, is far too low.

“We produce bread at very high cost,” he said, “and nowhere in the world is bread so dirt cheap as it is here. . . . If the government finally musters enough resolve to raise the price, I believe people will go along with it. . . . I would not be afraid to say that an increase of 3 to 4 times would be just about right.”

Bread sells for as little as 13 kopecks a loaf (about 17 cents).

Morgun gave his views as he and the American reporters rode in his white Volga along snow-packed roads on a night trip to Poltava. He acknowledged that his personal opinions were often radically different from others.

Wounded in The War

He was born in 1924, and was not quite old enough to be drafted when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941, but he joined the army soon afterward and became a noncommissioned officer. He was wounded in October, 1944.

He attended an agricultural institute and was graduated as a soil specialist. His first big job was in the famous “virgin lands” experiment in Kazakhstan, aimed at opening up new areas for growing grain.

He wrote a book in defense of the project after his transfer to a desk job in Moscow. In 1973, when there was an opening in the top party post in his native Poltava region, he returned and was elected to the job.

Morgun married his childhood sweetheart and they have three grown children and six grandchildren. The oldest grandchild, Bogdan, is not quite 5 but “he yells at me more than anyone else,” Morgun said.

He told the reporters that “we should exchange not just scientists and teachers but grandchildren as well.”

“If I could do it,” he said, “I would send my grandchildren to the United States to learn English . . . for better understanding.”

Morgun clearly has years of work ahead of him, but he has thought of retiring to the countryside someday. Almost misty-eyed, he said: “I love farmers. I love the farming life.”