TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/100289/10028900.023

Text File | 1990-09-18 | 7KB | 117 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."