COLUMN ONE : Loneliness of a Soviet Farmer : Even as experts urge a free-enterprise system for food, private farmers remain a rare breed. For one Russian couple, life outside the collective farm is a grueling test.

Half a mile down a winding dirt road in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, past quacking clusters of ducks, past the pigpen and stray cows, just past the thatched-roofed hut, Nikolai Petrovsky is trying to be a farmer.

But with shortages of fuel and equipment--not to mention the frosty attitude of local authorities--each day is a grueling contest with time and nature.

“During summer, we can get only three hours’ rest,” said his wife, Raisa, one of four family members who toil on this lonely patch of earth without any employees.

Petrovsky, 50, is a private farmer, an exotic calling in this region near the Black Sea, legendary for its lush, brown soil and sunny climate. Most farms in the Soviet Union are big state and collective enterprises, cogs in a machine of central planning that has sputtered and stalled, leaving grocery shelves empty and fears of hunger on the rise.

Today, a growing chorus of experts say pioneers such as Petrovsky, a former mechanic, are keys to solving one of the country’s most crucial problems--getting more food from rich farmland into empty kitchens.

What is needed, they argue, is a free-enterprise system of food--in effect, a private pipeline from the country to the city made up of farmers, wholesalers, distributors and grocers, all motivated by profit.

“The first step should be to divide the land and return it to the peasants who used to work it as their own,” declared Vladimir A. Tikhonov, a leading agricultural economist. “Otherwise, we’ll have problems with food every year.”

But in conservative, well-fed Krasnodar--sort of a Soviet Iowa--few are taking the step toward free enterprise.

Russian law has allowed people to petition for land and operate their own farms since 1990. And as many as 70,000 private holdings have popped up throughout the whole Soviet Union.

But many may be more akin to large gardens then to genuine, full-time farms. Around Krasnodar, out of 2 million farm workers, just 1,500 have chosen to go it alone, according to Yuli Semenenko, a correspondent for the agricultural newspaper Selskaya Zhizn.

They have reason to be wary. Private farmers in Russia get no guarantee that they will keep the land as long as they wish.

Many are simply scared, moreover, of leaving the womb of the collectives, which provide their members everything from seeds and tractors to child care and entertainment. In a time when equipment and fuel are precious commodities, big farms are much better positioned to get what is available than are their tiny brethren.

Outside the collective, “I’m searching for the market, searching for the customer,” said Valentin Kozlov, a pioneer farmer who desperately wants a truck so that he can haul his melons to nearby communities without paying a middleman.

To understand the enduring appeal of the collectives, one need only visit the Mayak (Lighthouse) Farm, which sprawls in all directions from a dusty crossroads known as Village of the Cossacks.

The enterprise--named the Lighthouse of Communism until the August coup attempt--looks like a slightly worn page from a fairy tale. Parades of geese strut in the shade of weeping willows, fields of sunflowers have turned scraggly in autumn, a horse-drawn carriage clatters by red-brick cottages. Members can stroll down a dirt path to the “Palace of Culture,” the scene of disco dancing and showings of Italian and American movies.

If the facilities are modest--an outhouse is located outside the administration building--workers know they need worry little about survival.

Earlier this year, when the collective informed its 1,500 members that they could apply to buy private plots of land, only 10 venturesome souls took the leap.

“I wouldn’t have enough money to hire assistants,” explained Volodya Leonovetz, 54, one of the vast majority who deemed it unwise to leave the Lighthouse.

Wearing a cap to shield himself from the midday sun, Leonovetz said he likes the proud “Cossack spirit” of the community, the security of his work and the availability of such commodities as sugar and sunflower oil, which are harder to find off the farm.

Beyond the comforts, another obstacle is blocking the path that would lead peasants back to private farms.

In the late 1920s and 1930s, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin brutally smashed the age-old system of private peasant farms, slicing up properties and herding hapless workers onto new state and collective enterprises. More than 1 million Cossacks were killed in that era; landowners with more than two horses were banished to Siberia.

Even today, the legacy weighs heavily on many who question whether private farms will be allowed to stay in private hands, despite current economic reforms emanating from Moscow.

Stanislav Zakaluzhni takes a break from repairing a big, red combine parked next to a small mountain of hay to explain. “All the connections between the peasant and the land were destroyed,” said the 24-year-old Zakaluzhni, who has the gray-blue eyes, blond hair and mustache typical of the Cossacks here. “They’ll never be established.”

He, too, considers it folly to quit the collective. As is true with many Russians, the notions of private business and criminality are closely linked in his mind. “They sometimes steal parts from our tractors,” he said of the private farmers. “Without collectives like this, the private farms wouldn’t last long.”

Attitudes are no different at the Leninist Collective Farm, just 10 minutes away down an unpaved road littered with stones and sugar beets. Despite the new freedoms, here, too, only a few of the 1,200 members have applied to local officials to be private farmers.

“I can get very nice land, but it’s not possible to work using only my own hands,” said Nikolai Rizhov, a 36-year-old driver, as co-workers nodded in agreement. “I need equipment.”

Despite the allegiance of such workers, the collective farms--which employ one in five working Soviets--are in serious trouble. They are being squeezed between suppliers of equipment, who demand to be paid in hard currency or barter instead of rubles, and Russian government officials, who still impose price controls. Grain production has fallen throughout the country, as farms scrape by with less fuel and machinery.

In Krasnodar--which likes to think of itself as the “Pearl of Russia” for the fertile fields that produce corn, rice, sugar beets and 120 other products--grain production on some farms is down 20%. On top of that, many farms are hanging on to large stockpiles of food instead of selling it to the state, where it ultimately would end up in the now-bare cupboards of urban dwellers.

Some say the supply shortages and chronic inadequacies in storage and transportation point to a more fundamental problem. The old, centrally controlled economy--in which enterprises were told what and how much to grow, where to sell their produce and which supplies to use--is crumbling. Yet, virtually nothing has emerged to replace it--certainly not a market system that would ensure responsiveness to consumer needs.

“It was a bad system, but at least we could eat,” Filipp Konareyv, a professor at Krasnodar Agricultural University, said of the collapsing command economy,

Soviet reality remains stacked against anyone who wants to conduct real business involving food or any other product. Credit is hard to come by, private property is not fully protected, technical assistance is scarce and the laws are unclear.

Rules still favor the older state enterprises, for instance, in choosing which farmland goes to newcomers. Overall, the infrastructure of free enterprise remains primitive.

“Farmers cannot sell potatoes to a private grocery in Moscow, because there are no private groceries in Moscow,” said Kirill Mozhin, an agriculture researcher at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. “They can sell only what they can bring in their little cars.”

Nonetheless, in the village of Azovskaya, 20 miles south of downtown Krasnodar, Nikolai Petrovsky is fighting the odds, peddling his milk to shops or the occasional entrepreneur who wants to take it off his hands.

Last year, when word spread that people would be allowed to apply for their own farmland, the former tractor repairman jumped at the chance.

“I was getting older; we weren’t rich. It was time to do something,” explained the 50-year-old Petrovsky, a wiry, gray-haired farmer.

His goal was to grow grain. But the 47 acres he was awarded from a local collective turned out to be hilly, castoff property. Instead of planting grain, Petrovsky bought a herd of cattle.

He still dreams of getting more land for grain. Then he would hire someone to drive a tractor, he says. But official approval hasn’t come through.

And Petrovsky is having trouble handling what he does have. Feeding the herd is costly. He has been forced to swap beef to get a needed refrigerator and to trade milk for grain--necessary deals, but unprofitable.

“We work hard, but the laws don’t guarantee the land won’t be taken in a few years,” he says. Local officials, he adds, “aren’t helpful at all.”

Yet, as Petrovsky’s own story suggests, the spirit of free enterprise may be slowly creeping into Krasnodar.

In addition to the 1,500 who are trying to survive as private farmers, close to 30,000 people are dabbling in small patches of their own, while still relying on larger farms for their livelihood.

Capitalism is even knocking on the door of the Lighthouse Collective Farm. The enterprise plans to create ownership shares for its members so that everyone’s rewards will more accurately reflect the farm’s overall performance.

Certainly, the Lighthouse will not soon be mistaken for a profit-driven U.S. corporation. No one plans to shut down its Palace of Culture, evict the retirees or cancel the day-care program.

But clearly, something foreign is in the rural air.

Ivan Ubijko--the soft-spoken director, who bears a resemblance to the late Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev--ponders the new economic realities over a lunch that features the bounty of his farm: borscht, tomatoes vinaigrette, cottage-cheese pancakes, fresh-baked bread and roast beef.

Turning to a guest, he asks: “Do you know a good American accountant?”