Ukraine Turns to Food as a Political Weapon : Soviet Union: It is the country’s breadbasket, and it’s using that position in a trade fight with other republics.

Ukrainian Agriculture Minister Alexander Tkachenko struts arrogantly these days, like a man who knows he is holding all the cards.

“There are bread shortages in St. Petersburg? Maybe those people are very bad managers,” sniffs Tkachenko as he tours a Ukrainian collective farm here.

“They don’t know how to run a business. It is time for them to stop all these (political) meetings in St. Petersburg and Moscow and stop this chanting in the streets and get down to their real jobs.

“This is their cup of tea, not ours.”

V. I. Lenin once said that grain is the “currency of currencies.” Today, Lenin’s words have come back to haunt the nation that he founded as it splits apart at the seams.

With demonstrations over shortages by thousands in Moscow this week, food shortfalls already rampant in major cities and many Soviet leaders predicting that things will only get worse when winter sets in, food-rich republics such as the Ukraine have suddenly gained enormous political leverage.

More than any other republic, the Ukraine, the nation’s breadbasket, is flexing its new-found muscle.

Now that power in the post-coup Soviet Union has shifted from the central government to the republics, the Ukraine has begun to turn the screws on the Soviet food supply in what amounts to a high-stakes battle for a greater say over trade relations with the Russian Federation and the other republics.

Ukrainian officials said in interviews here and in Kiev that they have stopped grain shipments to Russia and other Soviet republics. The Ukraine, which has declared its independence, plans to keep all of its harvest for itself.

The trade friction over grain provides a glimpse into the worsening political obstacles that stand in the way of food distribution in the Soviet Union. The new rivalries between republics is making it ever more difficult for the Soviet Union to feed itself and so has transformed a nation blessed with vast agricultural riches from a superpower into a beggar as it pleads for food aid from its former enemies in the West.

Tkachenko and other officials in the government of Leonid Kravchuk, the chairman of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet and the republic’s former Communist Party leader, insist that the Ukrainian harvest has been poor this year.

“This year we have nothing to sell,” said Tkachenko. “We have only enough for the Ukraine.”

Yet Tkachenko admits that the Ukraine may resume food shipments if it agrees later to a new agricultural trade pact--already signed by almost every other Soviet republic. While the official line is that there is no grain to sell, the Ukrainians are apparently holding out for better terms.

And they seem willing to wait. The Ukraine this month refused to sign the treaty establishing an economic community among the Soviet republics, saying that it needed greater guarantees of its independence and objecting to Russian domination of the new common market. The move could threaten the stability of Ukrainian trade with the rest of the Soviet Union.

The Ukrainian ban on grain shipments has worsened a trade war with the Russian Federation, which has curtailed its shipments of gasoline to the Ukraine and other republics.

The trade war’s result: still more bottlenecks in a national food distribution system that is now threatened with complete collapse.

While there are bread lines in St. Petersburg because the Ukrainians won’t sell their grain, there are also gas lines in Kiev, and Ukrainian farmers here warn that some crops are not being harvested because they can’t run their combines and other equipment.

“There is not enough gas for our collective,” complains Sergei Filipchenko, a farmer on a Kiev-area collective. “The tomatoes are rotting in the fields.”

But with food lines lengthening in Russian cities, the Ukrainians still seem to have the upper hand as the nation prepares for winter. Rampant inflation has made the ruble virtually worthless, so farming regions have little incentive to sell their food for currency.

“We have been trying to work out stable relations (with farming regions) at the republic level and at the local level through barter, because the ruble holds no interest,” says Leonid Dobrovolsky, first deputy of the City Council’s food committee in St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad. “But about 70% of the industrial production in the St. Petersburg area is for defense, and so we have few consumer goods to trade.”

Under the old centralized system, the Ukrainians would never have gotten away with keeping their food for themselves. Moscow would simply order the republics to ship their grain to a central site controlled by the national government, which then distributed the food to the country. And the Red Army and the KGB were there to make sure the central government’s orders were followed.

Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major cities were usually given preference in the food allocation system, and outlying regions, even those that produced food, often were forced to make do with less.

But that system is breaking down. The Ukraine and other republics have balked at filling their quotas for the central grain fund, which this year has received only about 30 million to 35 million tons of grain, compared to about 60 million tons last year.

For Ukrainian leaders, the breakdown in the central control of the food distribution system has presented an unprecedented opportunity. The Ukraine, which was starved into submission under forced farm collectivization and Communist rule imposed by Josef Stalin in the 1930s, has real control over its harvest for the first time in generations.

“In the past, Moscow and St. Petersburg had everything,” complains Mikola Solodkii, the Ukrainian vice minister for agriculture. “Everything was at the center, and there were food shortages in rural areas. Now we have more normal relations, where things will be more equal.”

The Kravchuk government seems to be following its tough new line on grain trade at least partly to gain political support at home. The Ukraine plans to hold its first democratic elections in December, and Kravchuk, who has virtually shed his Communist views and is running hard as a Ukrainian nationalist, faces strong opposition from a reform party led by a former political prisoner.

But many Ukrainian farm workers disagree with the attempt to use grain as a political bargaining chip.

Maria Partykya, a worker on a collective farm near Obukhov, remembers how bitterly her mother talked of the terror-famine in the Ukraine of the 1930s, when Stalin sought to starve the peasants.

But today, Partykya is not out for revenge. “If they are hungry and have no bread, we must share,” she says.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Edward R. Madigan, who met with Ukrainian officials this month while visiting the Soviet Union to discuss American food aid, also warned the Ukrainians against holding back their grain at a time when the United States plans to provide emergency assistance to relieve food shortages in Soviet cities.

“If they think they can keep their grain from other republics and then sell it on overseas markets, they have to think again,” Madigan said.

But just as the Ukrainian government tries to assert its power within the new inter-republic framework forming in the Soviet Union, it seems in danger of losing control over its own farmers.

Ukrainian officials have conceded to U.S. agriculture experts that the republic’s farm collectives have shipped only about 12.7 million tons of grain into the republic’s official state distribution system, well below the 17 million tons they were supposed to submit.

Ukrainian officials insist that heavy rains have hurt the harvest, but U.S. officials believe that much of the grain has been harvested and is being held back by newly emboldened managers of farm collectives.

The managers of collectives are angry that the prices they must pay for equipment and machinery have risen far faster than the prices they receive from the state for their crops. Ukrainian officials have reportedly allowed state prices paid to farms to rise 40%, but prices for machinery have doubled or tripled. So collectives are apparently hiding the grain in hopes of getting better prices in private markets during the winter.

But without adequate on-farm storage facilities--the Communists built most grain elevators in the large cities to try to prevent farmers from holding back food--much of the Ukrainian harvest is probably spoiling in open-air grain piles, American analysts believe.

To combat the problem, the Ukrainian government has resorted to traditional Communist tactics by mounting a television advertising campaign exhorting farmers to sell to the state, while also imposing new laws against “improper storage of grain.”

But Kravchuk far refused to take the logical steps of freeing prices and allowing the full privatization of the republic’s farm sector. The Kravchuk regime has not agreed to private ownership of farmland and so most farming is still done by highly inefficient collectives. Ukrainian officials insist that 1,700 “private” farms have been created since the beginning of 1991, but those farmers are merely leaseholders who don’t really own the small plots of land they work.

At the same time, officials at collective farms, fearful that private farmers might usurp their grip on the agricultural economy, have been refusing to provide enough machinery or raw materials to the leaseholders, who often have nowhere else to turn. So frustrated Ukrainian farmers seem to be counting on the December elections to finally bring real change.

“I would love to have a big farm like American farmers; that is my dream,” says Victor Krilenko, 22, who is raising 10 pigs near his home outside Kiev. “Maybe in the future I will. But not with our government now.”