Supreme Soviet Moves to Allow Private Farms

Soviet legislators, in a decision that effectively reverses Josef Stalin’s years of bloody collectivization, approved in principle Tuesday a bill that would permit the private ownership of farmland--something once viewed as a fundamental betrayal of Communist ideals.

The legislation is among the most important to be discussed by this session of the Supreme Soviet, or legislature, because it is the basis of government hopes to increase farm production and thus correct severe economic shortfalls that have led to chronic and widespread food shortages.

“If our debates and meetings are destined to go down in history, it will be due to the adoption of this land law,” Russian writer Vasily Belov told the legislature from the podium in a Kremlin hall, drawing applause.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has said the country’s current consumer crisis presents the most serious challenge to his rule.

Coupled with a draft property law already approved in principle, the two bills for the first time offer the possibility of a mixed Soviet economy that would include private enterprise. The property bill provides for individual ownership of the means of production.

Gorbachev himself initially proposed last year changing the land law to permit private leasing or ownership of land and to give farmers the right to pass land on to their children. Private garden plots, permitted since the time of Stalin, have long disproportionately contributed to the country’s food supply, with goods from these plots sold in so-called free markets.

But conservatives and even some moderates opposed the Gorbachev proposal, saying it compromises the principles of communism, could lead to land speculation and might actually further damage the economy by encouraging an abrupt discarding of collective farms and undue reliance on unprepared individual farmers.

The current 47-point bill, which takes into account about 2,400 suggestions received from across the country, forbids the private sale of land and allows the leadership of each individual republic to determine the terms of the contract for buying or leasing land.

It also provides tax breaks and other economic benefits for farmers who take proper ecological care of their land, a new concept in the Soviet Union.

“The bill . . . is a sizable step forward,” said sociologist Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a deputy. “In granting to the republics the right to define the conditions for the transfer of land into private property, the bill takes into account the vast differences among the country’s regions in the attitude of their population to private property.”

But Anatoly Kosyanov, director of the federal union of collective farms and one of the few deputies to speak against the legislation, warned that it could lead to disintegration of collective farms and disorganization in the agricultural sector.

“It is strong collective farms, and not the private farms, that can feed the country,” he declared.

“People will never leave viable, profitable farms,” countered Belov, the writer. “But without the right to withdraw from collective farms, the farmer becomes a serf. And serfdom based on Marxism must vanish.”

Boris Oleinik, the deputy chairman of the Council of Nationalities, one of the Supreme Soviet’s two houses, called for the establishment of a political party to represent the long-ignored rights of farmers and act as “a reliable partner of the Communist Party.”

Alexander Nikonov, a deputy and agriculture expert from the Academy of Sciences, warned against raising consumer expectations in the short run.

“It is illusory to believe that the new law on land will make the Soviet Union an agricultural country in a year or two,” he told the Supreme Soviet.

Nevertheless, he said, the bill is important because it “recognizes the prolonged powerlessness of the farmer and secures in the future his freedom of choice and the right to own the goods he produces and the profits he gets from marketing them.”

After being approved in principle in Tuesday’s session in the Kremlin--the vote was 349 in favor, 6 against and 10 abstaining--the draft bill was sent to committees for final revisions and is due to be voted on, article by article, by the Supreme Soviet next week.

Stalin believed that under private ownership, the country’s agricultural production was doomed to only gradual improvement but that if he could harness and control farm production, he could achieve dramatic improvements in food production.

Believing harsh measures would be better tolerated if they were carried out under an ideological banner, he specifically declared he was trying to rein in the prosperous peasants, pejoratively dubbed kulaks , or “tight fists.” Party leaders had long harbored a political distrust of the peasants, viewing them as potential political dissenters.

Stalin’s effort at collectivization began in earnest in 1930, and the farmers resisted violently. But Stalin made death the penalty for taking any collective grain for individual use or for refusing to deliver grain to state collectors.

Over the next two to three years, millions of farmers, virtually all those who had demonstrated exceptional competence before collectivization, were killed or deported, and millions of people died from famine, many of them in the Ukraine.

In addition, about half the livestock of Russia was destroyed, either by farmers who did not want to give up their animals to the collective or by neglect in unprepared collectives.

The draft land law breaks new ground in calling specifically for sound ecological use of land, listing that as one of the responsibilities of land owners and leasers. It says some of the money accrued from leasing or selling will be used “for soil conservation, upgrading of the land and land management.”

In other action Tuesday, the Supreme Soviet adopted a resolution expressing concern about massive demonstrations planned for Sunday in Moscow, Leningrad and other cities.

Liberal legislators have said they hope to gather 1 million people on the streets of Moscow to call for faster reform--or five times the 200,000 demonstrators who turned out Feb. 4 on the eve of a Communist Party Central Committee meeting in what was one of the largest rallies in Moscow since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

The Supreme Soviet resolution warned that “forces interested in destabilizing the situation” intend to join the demonstrations.

“In order to prevent action by militants or possible criminal forces, the Supreme Soviet asks the government and local authorities to adopt all necessary measures to protect law and order,” the resolution said. “ Perestroika and democratization must be protected by the law.”

Also Tuesday, the Moscow Radio publication Interfax reported that legislative leaders introduced a bill to allow republics to break away from the Soviet Union after a referendum.

Republics are currently given the constitutional right to declare their independence from the Soviet Union, but the method of accomplishing this has never been spelled out.