Word: ukraina
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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...
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...
...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...
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...
...lobby of Moscow's Hotel Ukraina, a dingy Stalin-era landmark, clerks who used to book reservations with paper chits now check guests in with a pair of Soviet-made computer terminals. Specialty stores that once tallied purchases on wooden abacuses have bypassed cash registers and gone directly to computers. And computers can now be found at the TASS news-wire service, at the offices of Aeroflot and at the government planning agency Gosplan...