TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100289/10028900.023

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.8 KB | 128 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN SCENE, Page 14

The Ukraine

Planting Some New Ideas


Ralph and Christine Dull bring a bit of Ohio to a Soviet farm

By Wendy Sloane


    When Ralph and Christine Dull of Brookville, Ohio, arrived
in the Ukraine last spring, they thought they knew what to
expect. After all, they had visited the Soviet Union six times
since 1983 under the auspices of international peace groups.
They believed the U.S. was not doing enough to help promote
peace and understanding, so they decided to take matters into
their own hands. "We felt that it was up to the American people
to establish contacts with the Soviets." Now near the end of
their sojourn, however, the Dulls are finding that their ideals
of cross-cultivation do not so easily take root.

    Working with the Soviet embassy in Washington and the
Soviet Ministry for Agriculture, the Dulls set up a unique
Soviet-American farm-exchange program. They would spend six
months on the Ukraina kolkhoz (collective farm), while a Soviet
farmer, Viktor Polormarchuk, worked on their spread back in
Brookville. (From his letters home, Polormarchuk's wife
Valentina reports that her husband is working hard, has lost
several pounds and talks about doing some private farming of his
own when he returns to the Soviet Union.) "Mikhail Gorbachev's
new proposals (for liberalizing the economy) fit in exactly with
what we think about independent farming," says Ralph Dull. "We
were very interested in the changes taking place in Soviet
agriculture, and we wanted to be part of that change."

    Ralph, 60, who customarily wears red-and-blue-checked
shirts and blue jeans, drives around the 12,000-acre Ukraina
collective farm, which lies just 100 miles from the Rumanian
border, as if it were his own 2,000-acre spread in Ohio. He
walks the fields, checking the condition of the crops, and drops
by smelly cow barns and even smellier pig farms to dispense tips
about raising livestock. In the evening Ralph gives lectures and
shows American agricultural films. Christine, 54, a petite
ex-schoolteacher, likes to engage the farmers and their families
in conversation. Though they live in the small village of Makov
(pop. 4,754), where only about half the people have running
water, the Dulls are comfortably housed in a former Communist
Party hunting lodge in the midst of a game reserve teeming with
wild animals. The Dulls have been given a car and gasoline and
receive a monthly stipend of about $700 apiece. Soviet farm
workers make as little as 90 rubles ($140) a month.

    When he arrived, Ralph Dull thought he could best assist
his Soviet friends by serving as a kind of senior adviser who
would help the Soviets improve their outmoded agricultural
methods. He had not expected to work in the fields. But some of
the Soviets had other ideas. One of them was the collective's
chairman, Vitali Vladimirovich Stengach. A large, ruddy-faced
man with a deceptively jovial manner, Stengach wields power on
the kolkhoz, answering only to the local party authorities.
Sitting in his huge office and guzzling a glass of the natural
mineral water famous in the area, Stengach pours out his
complaints. Says he: "We thought we would give him land to grow
whatever he wanted. We wanted him to bring his own grain,
tractors, herbicides and combines, so he could show us what can
be done. As it turns out, he's a bezdelnik" -- the Russian word
for loafer.

    "Why should I waste my time sitting on a tractor?" Dull
replied in an interview in the daily Izvestia. "There are
already 40 extra people here to do that." In Ohio, says Dull,
he and his three sons and one son-in-law run the farm
themselves; in the Ukraine, he estimates, an operation of the
same size would require the services of 140 workers and six
supervisors. On the Ukraina, wrinkled old women in kerchiefs
lead their cows on long, frayed ropes around the farm's winding
roads, trying to supplement their tiny pensions with money from
the eventual sale of the cattle. Antiquated tractors wheeze and
grunt alongside groups of young women bending painfully in the
hot sun. Says Ralph dryly: "In the Soviet Union there are more
agricultural supervisors than there are farmers in the U.S."

    Despite its inefficiency, the Ukraina kolkhoz is one of the
Soviet Union's most profitable collective farms. It employs
more than 7,000 people and earns a profit -- about $4.7 million
in 1988 -- on sales of cattle, corn, sugar beets, wheat and
other products. Yet mismanagement limits its progress. Dull
cites as one example a "specialist system," requiring that
people be trained to do only one specific task. Party officials,
often without agricultural expertise, constantly monitor to make
sure things are done as the party dictates. "Soviet farmers are
accustomed to having Big Brother watching over their shoulder,"
says Dull. "So they try hard to make a field look nice on the
surface. The result is that tillages may be done twelve times
instead of once, and seeds are often planted when the soil is
too wet."

    He endorses Gorbachev's proposals for reforming the Soviet
agricultural system. New land-rental policies, for example,
allow farmers for the first time to share profits with the
state, a step that Dull hopes will eventually lead to private
ownership. "My sons are enthusiastic about farming, but here the
farmers have nothing to be enthusiastic about," he says. "If
private farmers are given freedom of choice, they'll develop a
productive agriculture that fits their circumstances." A few
hundred feet from the Dulls' house are two privately run
greenhouses, set up by a five-man rental group that recently
entered into an agreement with the kolkhoz to grow cucumbers and
tomatoes. Ralph is so proud of the renters that he has
practically adopted all of them.

    Despite the changes taking place in the Soviet Union,
Dull's millennium is still a long way off. "It will take another
five years to see real results in increased production," he
believes, "The entrenched inefficiency and mismanagement that
are part of the Soviet bureaucratic system, however, will take
even longer to root out."

    The Dulls' idealism remains intact, but they have reached
some conclusions that discomfort their Communist hosts. "To me
the primary objective of socialism is to meet the basic needs
of the workers and not to exploit their labor," says Ralph. "I
think we're doing that in our farm in Ohio, because all the
workers are doing their own managing, owning, and sharing the
benefits and risks. They are not exploiting anyone else's cheap
labor." Left unsaid is that in the Soviet Union, the situation
may be exactly the reverse. Says Ralph: "If any of these state
farms were set down in Ohio, they would soon go bankrupt."