Soviet Leadership Divided Over Agricultural Reforms

The Soviet leadership appears deeply divided over the future development of the country’s long-troubled agricultural system in a key ideological as well as economic dispute over the course of future reforms here.

With a major Communist Party conference on agricultural policy only 10 days away, the party’s ruling Politburo failed in an extraordinary two-day session to agree on a strategy to reshape Soviet agriculture, one of the most acute problems facing the country, and ordered that policy papers be redrafted.

The dispute appears so fundamental that, by the time of the conference March 15, it could develop into one of the most important political confrontations yet between President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who is anxious to broaden and accelerate his four-year-old reform program, and conservatives wanting to limit the scope and pace of change to ensure what some now call “socialist continuity.”

In a communique published here Saturday, the Politburo declared that collectivized Soviet agriculture, which the state has strictly controlled for more than 50 years, requires “radical changes” not only in the way it is organized, but in the ability, now sharply restricted, of farmers to sell their produce to those wanting to buy it.

The Politburo called for a major diversification of agriculture--an idea championed by Gorbachev for the past year--so that family farmers, private entrepreneurs and small cooperatives can compete alongside the large collective and state farms that, for more than half a century, have dominated Soviet agriculture.

Conservative Opposition

The communique also recognized that this will require fundamental economic changes, which go to the heart of the Soviet political system and its current form of socialism. These, too, Gorbachev has supported, but they have been strongly opposed by party conservatives, fearing the break with past orthodoxy.

The result of the Politburo debate, which began on Thursday and continued into Friday evening, is not clear. According to the carefully worded communique, the Politburo decided that the draft proposal on agricultural reform “needs more work in the light of its discussion” by the party leadership.

On its face, this appeared to herald a victory for Gorbachev, who has strongly pushed for a return of the land to the farmers, increased scope for all types of entrepreneurship and decentralized management.

Declaring that all ideological “stereotypes and dogmas” be abandoned if the country’s worsening food shortage is to be ended, Gorbachev called during a recent tour of the Ukraine for the use of “all effective forms” of farming, including the leasing of state and collective farm assets to individuals and cooperatives, a return in some places to private farming and the establishment of small, privately owned businesses in rural areas.

“Do we really have to regard as the summit of socialist organization those chronic money losers where sponging dominates and where wages bear no relation to the work put in?” he asked. “To maintain these enterprises further through credits from the state budget, money that they will never pay back, is impossible and makes no sense.”

A decision along these lines by the party’s policy-making Central Committee next week would accelerate reforms throughout the economy and strengthen other liberal trends.

However, such a victory is not only far from certain, but Gorbachev could be facing one of his toughest challenges since he assumed the Soviet leadership four years ago this month.

Yegor K. Ligachev, the Politburo member in charge of agriculture and the most prominent conservative within the Soviet leadership, has been speaking forcefully in recent weeks about retaining those very parts of the agricultural system that seem so economically inefficient to Gorbachev, and he has been disparaging of the key elements of the reforms promoted by Gorbachev.

“There are people who think we should declare (unprofitable state and collective farms) bankrupt, give them away to leaseholders and then we will have piles of food,” Ligachev told an election meeting in the Siberian city of Omsk on Thursday, the same day that the Politburo session began in Moscow.

“But, first of all, it was not for this that we established Soviet power--to treat people, the working collective, in such a shabby fashion. After all, we are a society of social justice. . . . We have to find another path.”

Ligachev’s speech was reported extensively by Soviet television and radio, as well as by the official press, in what appeared to be a particularly bold political challenge to Gorbachev in advance of the Central Committee meeting.

The phrase that “it was not for this that we established Soviet power” has been the rallying cry for years of those who fear any change will mean a rollback of what they consider the gains of 70 years of socialism and a deviation into capitalism.

Ligachev’s strongly stated position seems certain to have prevented Gorbachev from pushing his own version of the proposed reforms through, even though the Politburo met well into the evening on Friday, and the issue will probably go to the Central Committee, where conservatives are in the majority.

But the Politburo’s action in sending back for revision the draft proposals, which presumably Ligachev’s staff had prepared for the upcoming Central Committee meeting, could also indicate that Gorbachev’s arguments were largely persuasive.

The Politburo meeting moreover may well have begun without Ligachev, who was traveling in western Siberia on Thursday, although agricultural policy was the principal topic.

The cautious wording of the communique only underlined the political sensitivity around such a fundamental dispute within the party’s topmost ranks.

The public debate between Gorbachev and Ligachev goes back more than a year, and it has encompassed foreign policy, economic reform, reorganization of the party, restructuring of the government and, perhaps above all, ideological issues.