Labor Unrest Spreading to Soviet Farms

Labor unrest that has paralyzed major segments of Soviet industry in recent months is spreading to the country’s farms at the height of the summer harvest, threatening to worsen already severe food shortages.

By Saturday, farmers in more than a dozen major agricultural regions had formed strike committees to push their demands, which focus on more governmental support for state and collective farms, increased supplies of consumer goods and greater overall concern for the quality of life in the country’s rural areas.

Unless they receive more fuel, machinery and spare parts immediately and can hire seasonal labor at reasonable prices, they are threatening to withhold their produce, let it rot in the fields or even plow it back into the ground.

“Unless the city people help in the vegetable fields, they will not get a single ounce of food,” the regional council in Michurin, a farming area southeast of Moscow, warned its urban customers.

Already characterized by the Communist Party newspaper Pravda as a possible “peasants’ revolt,” the movement now ranges from Kostroma northeast of Moscow to Perm on the western slopes of the Ural Mountains to Karaganda in Kazakhstan, in Soviet Central Asia.

Although they have the potential for a good or even bumper harvest this year, Soviet farmers are complaining that the accelerating collapse of the country’s economy has left them unable to gather the crops.

They do not have enough fuel for their harvesting equipment or enough spare parts to keep machines operating. There are not enough trucks to take the produce from the fields into town and not enough gasoline for the trucks they do have. And fewer city residents are coming to help with the harvest this year.

The situation is so critical that Boris N. Yeltsin, the president of Russia, the largest Soviet republic, warned last week of a potential catastrophe unless the farmers are given “vigorous assistance” with the harvest by the cities.

The farmers also complain, in a strong echo of the grievances of the country’s coal miners, oil-field workers and others who have struck in recent months, that the lack of consumer goods and rising inflation has made the money they receive for their produce almost worthless and daily life increasingly difficult.

They are seeking, more fundamentally, to restore the balance between agriculture and industry and between the rural and urban economies that was destroyed by dictator Josef Stalin when he first collectivized agriculture and then used the funds it generated to finance, in large part, the country’s industrial development.

“If we do not manage to find a way to merge the interests of town and country, we (urbanites) may find ourselves on an even more meager ration,” Pravda warned. “And this at a time when the farmers have grown an excellent harvest. Isn’t this a crime?”

The newly formed Soviet Agrarian Union last week called for far-reaching changes to redress the economic imbalance, now recognized as the key to solving the country’s perpetual food shortage, and to improve the quality of life in rural areas, which are dying from cultural as well as economic poverty.

“How much longer do you think we should put up with this?” Leonid Shamkov, head of a collective farm in Kostroma, said as he complained to Pravda of a system that has methodically transferred the wealth of the countryside to the government and industry. “We can’t stand it anymore.

“You in Moscow apparently do not realize what the real state of affairs is in our agriculture--the village has been virtually forced to its knees.”

Maria Persiyantseva, former chairwoman of a collective farm and a leader in the “peasants’ revolt,” said farmers should harvest as much as they can but be selective in their deliveries.

“It would be immoral for farmers to strike while the harvest spoils,” she said. “So, we are not going to strike in the farm fields.

“But we are the owners of the farm produce we turn out. This is a powerful lever, and in extreme circumstances we will use it.”

In Perm, agricultural leaders declared that any city or town that refuses to send workers and vehicles to help with the harvest will receive no food.

“Not a bottle of milk to the enterprises!” the chairman of one regional agricultural committee in the Perm area said. “Only this will show the power of the peasantry.”

A member of the Perm strike committee said city residents will begin to understand the plight of farmers only when “water, just water, was served at (factory) canteens for the first, second and third courses.”

Shamkov said that in past years, farms got help in harvesting from factory workers in nearby towns, but “now that factories operate on the pay-your-own-way principle, the prices they demand for seasonal farm work are enough to make you scream.”

Workers at a railway depot at Bui, north of Kostroma, demanded a 75% premium for farm work plus overtime plus pay for days off. “Such aid can only ruin us,” Shamkov said.

The threats worked in Perm, the trade union newspaper Trud reported on Saturday. Many more factory workers were sent to help in the fields, and 900 trucks were dispatched to bring the harvest to the processing centers.

City officials are now discussing new “treaties” that will ensure the region’s farms the assistance they need in return for guaranteed deliveries of food.