Gorbachev Urges Revival of Co-Op Farms to Bolster Soviet Agriculture

Mikhail S. Gorbachev called for greater freedom for collective farmers and other cooperatives Wednesday to rejuvenate the Soviet Union’s struggling agricultural sector and enable the nation to feed itself.

Gorbachev called the cooperatives a “brilliant discovery” of Soviet founder Vladimir I. Lenin that have been under-used, and even despised, by subsequent rulers.

“We should revive co-ops not in their old, often too-primitive forms, but in the form of a modern, high-standard cooperative movement extensively integrated . . . with government-run enterprises and organizations,” he said, speaking at the first national congress of collective farmers to be held since 1969.

Collective farms, or kolkhozes, where members of a cooperative jointly own farm buildings and machinery and share in earnings, have faded in recent decades in favor of state farms, where workers, like factory employees, traditionally receive wages.

“The consequences of such an attitude to kolkhozes, to cooperatives as a whole, are well-known,” Gorbachev said. “To it must be laid the delayed solution of the food problem, the deficit and narrowness of an assortment of many consumer goods, the limited nature of the service sector.”

There were 33,000 collective farms in the Soviet Union in 1970, but their number dropped to 26,300 by 1986, while the number of collective farmers dropped from 16.7 million to 12.6 million.