World Notes SOVIET UNION

There is hardly a more painful period in Soviet history than the years beginning in 1929, when Joseph Stalin forcibly collectivized agriculture. More than 10 million people are believed to have died of starvation as Stalin herded peasants onto huge state farms and marched their former bosses, the well-to-do kulaks, off to Siberia. Given history and Communist dogma, it seemed that not even Mikhail Gorbachev would dare challenge the primacy of the collective farm in the system. But last week the General Secretary did exactly that.

In a speech to farmers and officials at a Central Committee conference, Gorbachev called for a broad reorganization of agriculture under which many collective enterprises would be subdivided into smaller, leased tracts to give Soviet farmers a financial incentive for increasing production. "We have transformed them," said Gorbachev of the farmers, "from masters of their land into day laborers."

Such land leasing has already been introduced experimentally in some areas, with great success. Pravda reported two weeks ago that a group of families permitted to lease part of a state farm in Belorussia increased onion production more than six times that of the state-run enterprise's output two years earlier.

Conspicuously absent from the Central Committee meeting was Yegor Ligachev, the Gorbachev rival who only two weeks ago was named head of a new commission on agriculture. A government spokesman said Ligachev was "on vacation," but that "doesn't mean we shouldn't address the question of agriculture."