Ukrainian peasants work in a primitive economy circumscribed by the nearest wheat field, sugar refinery, distilling plant and brick kiln. They earn no cash, receiving instead a small percentage of the produce they harvest. And while they are technically free to leave the land, the condition of the Ukrainian economy turns this liberty into the right to starve by the side of the road. Worse, the peasants labor at the mercy of collective farm chairmen every bit as powerful and reactionary as the feudal lords of, say, medieval France. As the term implies, the chairman's position is ostensibly an elective office. But Soviet practice and the post-Soviet depression have turned most of these 'men of the people' into prison wardens profiting from the labor of their inmates. Show a thinly disguised text of Alexander's manifesto to the rare Ukrainian villager who pays attention to the news these days, and he will probably attribute it to a Rukh campaign pamphlet.
The government has responded to the problem with pretend-reforms that have given collective farmers the right to lease land without breaking up the centralized supply and procurement system it inherited from the Soviet regime.
Most farmers striking out on their own today would have to pull their own plows and squat in fields to fertilize the soil. Even the state procurement quota, a legacy of roving bands of Bolsheviks who once roamed the countryside shooting peasants hiding food in cellars has survived until this year. The Agriculture Ministry says it's been canceled, but the Agriculture Ministry has lied before. To be fair, reform has also been blocked by a recalcitrant Parliament that, at the behest of collective farm chairmen (no surprise there), has blocked legislation legalizing the ownership of land. Without that law, no farmer can get credit for seeds, machinery or fertilizer, because no bank will accept a lease agreement as loan collateral. That's no excuse, however, for the government's failure to break up monopolies that supply farm inputs and provide storage and marketing services at extortionate cost to producers. Nor can it explain the use of scarce funds to purchase large American combines affordable only to collective farms instead of smaller, less sophisticated tractors that would aid fledgling family farms. Economies of scale will start to matter only years after Ukraine stops paying the price for diseconomies of collectivization by literally splitting up the land. A century-and-a-third is long enough for the most utopian plan to be turned into practice. Free the serfs.
