Kremlin Agriculture Chief Denounced as Incompetent

Yegor K. Ligachev, the Communist Party Politburo member in charge of Soviet agriculture, was denounced as incompetent Thursday as rebellious members of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet Union’s new assembly, continued their unrestrained assault on the country’s leadership.

In a scathing attack, a leading agricultural specialist said that Ligachev, the voice of conservatism within the ruling Politburo, simply knew nothing about farming, nothing about rural life and nothing about the agrarian economy.

“Why has such a politically important sphere--decisive for perestroika --been given to a man who is so absolutely ignorant of it and who had already failed (to provide leadership) in ideology?” Yuri D. Chernichenko, a commentator on agricultural affairs, demanded. “How could this happen?”

Heads swiveled in the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, where the 2,250 deputies have been meeting for a week, toward the special section where Ligachev was sitting with other members of the Politburo. But Ligachev’s countenance was impassive through the howls of laughter at Chernichenko’s sarcasm and then the applause for his boldness.

Freed from past political restraints and given a Kremlin forum, the newly elected deputies are saying things, all broadcast live on television and radio across the country and printed in the press the next day, that the most radical of dissidents would have hesitated to whisper behind locked doors even five years ago.

Every attempt by the leadership to limit debate has so far been rejected by the deputies, who now are discussing President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s state-of-the-union report--and who could do so for several more days as scores more deputies ask to speak. The inaugural session was supposed to have ended Wednesday or Thursday, but could now go on for another week.

No one, not even Gorbachev, has been spared in the heated, sometimes tumultuous debates as the congress has split into progressive and conservative wings and entered many previously “forbidden zones,” including national defense, foreign policy, the security services and the Communist Party leadership.

Despite the criticism, Vadim A. Medvedev, the Politburo member now in charge of ideology, said after Thursday’s session that he was pleased with the first week of the congress.

“We are going in the right direction,” he told reporters. “The forms for giving power to the people will be perfected. . . . It is very good that we are finding the way forward through discussion. Consolidation of opinion, of people, is the way to tackle our problems.”

But another Politburo member, Lev N. Zaikov, the Moscow party chief, said he thought the criticism went too far at times, and he defended Ligachev.

“You just can’t take the podium, not knowing a person, and say such things,” Zaikov said. “Ligachev is trying to fulfill the tasks assigned to him by the Politburo. We all try to be trustworthy Communists.”

Chernichenko, respected as one of the most insightful specialists on agricultural policy and rural development, had ridiculed--to the laughter of hundreds of other deputies--the performance of the state-run agricultural system, whose poor output is a national crisis as well as a disgrace.

“How can it be explained . . . that the economy that produces five times more tractors and 10 times more combine harvesters than the United States produces only half as much bread?” Chernichenko asked, naming Ligachev whose Politburo status would have protected him from such direct attacks in the past.

The implicit question in Chernichenko’s broadside went well beyond agriculture, however, to the balance of power between progressive and conservative forces within the top party leadership--particularly after Gorbachev himself had complained that agricultural reforms, despite decisions of the party’s policy-making Central Committee, were being blocked by conservatives.

Ligachev, a graduate of an aircraft design institute, was the party leader in the Siberian city of Tomsk for nearly 20 years, coming to Moscow in 1983 and handling ideological matters until he was shifted to agriculture nine months ago.

Where Gorbachev has emphasized family farming and private business as the way to increase food production and revive rural areas, Ligachev has continued to insist on maintaining the system of collective and state farms that the Soviet Union has developed over the past 50 years.

Chernichenko said that he believes the country’s food shortages would be ended within three years and that the rural economy would flourish if the congress voted to restore ownership of agricultural land to the farmers and to permit unrestricted private enterprise in rural areas.

“And who is against this?” he said, looking in Ligachev’s direction.

Ligachev later came under attack from another deputy, Nikolai Ivanov, a top investigator of official corruption, who had alleged earlier that the Politburo member was among the top officials figuring in a major investigation and that a cover-up was under way.

Suspended from the case and placed under investigation himself, Ivanov asked whether this itself was not evidence of an attempted cover-up.

“Sixty-four investigators, including myself and Telman Gdlyan (another deputy), have been relieved of our duties,” Ivanov complained. “Why in that case should you not relieve Ligachev and others of their duties until this matter is settled?”

Ligachev has denied any wrong-doing.