Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...