Gorbachev Calls for Scrapping Collective System for Farms

Kremlin leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, urgently seeking to boost food production, has called for the reorganization of the whole of Soviet agriculture in an evident reversal of longstanding collective farm policy, Tass press agency reported today.

In a speech to an agricultural conference, Gorbachev gave strong backing to recently introduced plans to lease land to peasants for up to 50 years.

The conference at the Central Committee headquarters in Moscow was attended by farm managers, food industry officials, government ministers and senior party officials.

One notable absentee was Yegor K. Ligachev, appointed head of a new commission on agriculture during a Kremlin reshuffle two weeks ago. Spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov said Ligachev was still on vacation.

“But that does not mean that when Comrade Ligachev is on leave, we should not handle agricultural issues,” Gerasimov told a news briefing.

Coming Months Active

Ligachev was earlier reported to have broken off his vacation to attend the emergency Central Committee plenum on Sept. 30, when he was transferred to agriculture from his former post as Kremlin ideology chief.

In his speech, Gorbachev said: “The coming months will probably be the most active in all the years of perestroika in going over to new forms of economic management.” This would include the entire agrarian sector.

He criticized faults in the food storage and supply system, which he said caused severe losses.

“If everything produced at collective and state farms today were properly harvested, dispatched, transported, stored and processed, and actually reached the shop counter, it would add a minimum of 25% and by some estimates 40%,” he said.

Workers Lose Touch

Agriculture has long been hampered by a passive attitude and lack of incentive at all levels. Workers at collective and state farms had become separated from the land and as a result lacked the necessary feeling for it, Gorbachev said.

“We turned them from masters of the land into mere hirelings,” he declared.

His remarks suggested a readiness to concede that the policy of mass collectivization of agriculture carried out from 1929 by Josef Stalin, and justified by successive Soviet leaders since, could have been mistaken.

Gorbachev has in the past criticized “excesses” under collectivization--which Western and some Soviet historians say caused the deaths of millions of peasants--but maintained that the policy itself was correct.

In the early days under state founder Vladimir I. Lenin, Gorbachev said, the real interests of the peasantry and the changes taking place in the country were consistently taken into account.

But this was followed by a long period of prevarication, and a lack of understanding of the problems of village life, he said.

“This led to the situation which you and I face today and which we have only just started to put right,” he declared.