Soviet Farm Workers Spurn Offer to Rent Land

When the director of this collective farm offered Anna K. Milyokhin a chance to rent her own land, set her own hours and keep everything she earned, she didn’t have to think twice before she said no.

Milyokhin, a robust 53-year-old with a quick smile, spends 40 hours a week milking cows in a large, drafty shed--the latest in a series of jobs she has held on farms since the age of 12.

The work is tedious, but Milyokhin is convinced it is a far better life than she would have if she were to leave the collective and cast her lot with free enterprise.

“Who wants to be a slave to the farm?” she told a visitor recently. “If I rent my own patch of land, I will have to work much too hard. Sure, I would make more money, but what would I do with it? There’s nothing to buy in our stores.”

Red Field, begun 60 years ago under Communist Party principles that rewarded its people equally no matter how hard they worked, should be a perfect place to implement President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s agricultural reforms aimed at spurring personal initiative.

Profit-Making Venture

Red Field’s workers are industrious enough to have turned the collective into a profit-making venture that takes in millions of rubles a year. It has surplus land that its director has offered to rent. And Moscow is less than an hour away, a large and eager market where fresh vegetables, fruit and meat sell at premium prices.

But so far, not a single one of Red Farm’s 720 workers has taken the director up on his offer.

The nay-saying here underscores some of the problems the Kremlin faces in its effort to improve conditions in Soviet markets by loosening bureaucratic restrictions on the farm.

Gorbachev wants the farmers to become “masters of the land,” as he puts it, instead of being forced to follow plans drawn up by Moscow bureaucrats. He believes this will lead to better production and better delivery and will ease the food shortages that have plagued the Soviet Union almost since the time of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

If the shortages are not eased, Soviet analysts have warned, the public is increasingly likely to reject Gorbachev’s entire economic reform program.

Three months ago, Gorbachev pushed through a plan allowing farmers to lease plots for up to 50 years, a partial reversal of the bloody process of collectivization enforced by the dictator Josef Stalin in the 1930s.

Land-owning farmers who resisted collectivization were deported by the millions. Stalin said that private ownership led to exploitation of workers.

Now, in an ideological turnaround, the descendants of those farmers are being asked to till their own land again. Gorbachev believes that allowing such private entrepreneurship will provide the incentive needed to increase the acreage tilled and the number of cattle raised for slaughter.

Gorbachev’s farm policy is opposed by the Politburo’s agriculture chief, Yegor K. Ligachev, a conservative with strong misgivings about the direction in which Gorbachev is leading the country. Ligachev was ousted last year from the post as ideology chief.

Asked about Gorbachev’s efforts to back private farming, Ligachev told a meeting this month: “Some comrades try to make decisions about the form of property ownership without asking the farmers about it. For their part, the farmers support a collective economy.”

The Soviet agriculture system, Ligachev said, was built around the concept of big farms.

A system based on private ownership and small farms, he said, “would have to be created virtually from scratch. . . . It is absolutely obvious that disbanding collective and state farms would be an irretrievable error for our country.”

Red Field director Stanislav S. Lisitsin is also a believer in the collective system. He is skeptical about whether private farming will lead the Soviet Union to self-sufficiency in food.

Gorbachev, he warned, may find that the chance to make more money will not tempt farmers to work harder, in part because the stores are so empty that the extra rubles the farmers might earn would be worthless.

Red Field made a profit last year of 2.3 million rubles, about $3.7 million at the official exchange rate. This puts the farm in select company. Only about half of the Soviet Union’s 50,000 farms manage to make a profit.

Red Field workers raise cows, oxen, potatoes, carrots, cabbage and feed for the livestock on 1,475 acres. Last year, each worker was paid the equivalent of $475 a month, regardless of whether he drove a tractor, harvested crops or worked in the greenhouse.

Lisitsin, who has been the farm’s director for 14 years, is passionate about his job and the land. “There is nothing like passing by a field and seeing things growing, the results of your own work,” he said.

But he failed to pass that passion on to his two sons, 26 and 23, who never considered working on the farm. And this, Lisitsin believes, points to a flaw in the Soviet farming system.

“The statistics show fewer and fewer young people are choosing to work on the farm,” he said. “So if we want more food on the shelves throughout the country, we must first do more to attract young workers.”

Lisitsin said the way to attract more farm workers, particularly young families, is to improve housing and public services such as schools and hospitals.

Milyokhin said that she too thinks the first priority should be to attract young people. But she said she doubts that letting them lease plots is the answer.

“I support Comrade Gorbachev,” she said as she walked out of the milking shed on her afternoon break. “But I don’t want to have to work on my own land, and I don’t know anyone who does.”