n166  0504  08 Mar 85
BC-LAND-(Balt.)
     By Antero Pietila
    c. 1985 The Baltimore Sun
    
     Moscow - Collective farming--One of the tenets of Soviet
Communism--has come under criticism in a fierce attack on President
Konstantin U. Chernenko's plan to divert water from northern Russian
rivers and irrigate new agricultural land in the south.
     The attack appears in the current issue of Nash Sovremennik (''Our
Contemporary'') and is the latest in a series of critiques of the
Communist Party's decision last fall to go ahead with the
controvrsial river reversal plan.
     But the 26-page article in the monthly publication of the powerful
writers union breaks new ground when it attacks collectivization,
which Josef Stalin forced on peasants in the 1920s and 1930s.
Millions were killed during those years, when Communists confiscated
all private land and forced peasants to join farming collectives.
     Collectivization, says Fatey Shipunov, has led to ''our land
becoming faceless and therefore orphaned and also accounts for the
disruption of the spiritual origins of agriculture.''
     ''Only one person--the hereditary tiller of the soil--can improve
this patch of soil while bearing a moral responsibility for it,'' Mr.
Shipunov writes.
     He is critical of inexperienced managers, who are sent to rule in
the countryside with no personal feeling for the land and predicts:
''Mistrust toward the peasant, orders and coercion, are spelling
death to the land and to those living on it.''
     The article by Mr. Shipunov, an experienced writer on ecological
issues, is the strongest attack so far on the decision in October by
the Communist Party Central Committee to irrigate the parched areas
of the southern Soviet Union by reversing the flow of northern
Russian rivers.
     If the two-stage project is completed, one of its irrigation canals
would be long enough to run from Los Angeles almost to Chicago, and
the scheme itself could be the biggest construction undertaking in
the history of mankind.
     A result could be a dramatic increase in the country's food output.
But in the process, vast areas of northern Russia--including historic
towns - will be submerged and tens of tounsands of people displaced.
     Soviet scientists have argued about the diversion project with more
passion than about any other recent public issue. The partys no. 2
man, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, also criticized it before the Communist
Party decision was made.
     Analysts say that continued public debate on party policy indicated
that editors of party-linked publications, such as Nash Sovremennik,
had ceased to pay real attention to the ailing President Chernenko.
     Once adopted, party policy here is usually always above criticism.
     In his article, Mr. Shipunov condemns the ''$100 billion'' first
stage of the the river reversal project. He says that the best
lowland pastures will be flooded as gigantic artificial marshes
replace ''our ancient northern breadbasket.''
     He then turns his attention to the black earth region of the Soviet
Union, ''our main bread-basket.''
     ''Although those lands occupy only 8.6 per cent of the country's
territory, they account for 60 per cent of all arable land and
produce 80 per cent of all grain,'' he writes.
     He laments that although violent dust storms, followed by long
droughts, eroded the lands in the 1890s, little has been done to
preserve the soil. As a consequence, some parts of the Black Earth
Zone have lost as much as 60 per cent of their fertility.
     Indiscriminate use of fertilizers has led to further decline in
productivity, he writes.
     The existing soil improvement measures in the Black Earth Zone are
''not only unjustifiable but are leading to the destruction of our
black earth areas,'' Mr. Shipunov writes.
     Instead of diverting rivers at a cost of $100 billion, he says
agricultural lands could be retained and improved at a cost of $2.5
billion by planting forests that would tie the soil and regulate its
salinity.
     In the end, it is the farmer, however, who faces ''facelessness in
agriculture,'' ''a moral disease which is no less dangerous than
violent dust storms.''
     ''I am convinced,'' he concludes, ''that the peasant is growing
tired of the facelessness of the earth.''
     Nash Sovremennik circulates in 220,000 copies each month. Like all
Soviet journals, its contents are officially approved twice--when it
is ready for printing and when the final permission for printing is
granted.
    
     End Land
    
    
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