The Ukraine Planting Some New Ideas

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."