The Peasants' Plight

According to the Kiev-based daily Vecherniye Vesti, more and more people are now selling their city apartments and moving to the country—"not because life has improved in the village, but because surviving in the city has become so much harder." However, says the newspaper, resettlement of a considerable number of city dwellers to the countryside isn't reviving Ukrainian agriculture, since farmers work just to feed themselves, using the most primitive tools. This year, concludes Vecherniye Vesti, "Ukraine, a European state, is shifting to an ancient, cash-free economy." As Miroslav Popovich, Director of the Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences puts it: "We sit back on our fabled Ukrainian chernozem [rich black soil], and don't know what to do with it."

Olexander Chubuk, 42, a farmer in Zgurivka, about 100 km east of Kiev, does know what to do with the chernozem—but feels shackled by what he sees as anti-farmer policies on the part of the authorities. Chairman of the Zgurivka Farmers Association, Chubuk calls on his fellow farmers to vote at the coming parliamentary election for the opposition Our Ukraine block, led by former Premier Victor Yushchenko. "We don't expect much," says Chubuk, "But hope for the wind of change."

Chubuk built his farm back in 1992 from three hectares of rented land. Now, he grows wheat, rye and sugar beet on 420 rented hectares and seems to be doing quite well—all his machinery and equipment have been bought from profits he made over the past decade. Still, his hard work cannot break the wall that confronts farmers. He complains of the tax pressure that seems designed to destroy private farming. "Yushchenko was the first one to say that what was good for farmers was good for the state," says Chubuk. "It was Yushchenko who introduced the fixed flat tax that didn't milk us dry." Once the Parliament and President Leonid Kuchma kicked Yushchenko out in April 2001, Chubuk says, they formally kept his policies, but cut all the funding to support them.

In the Soviet era, the arable lands were owned by huge collective farms. Now, ten years since independence, the Ukrainian state parcels out these lands to peasants in four- to five-hectare plots as property they can keep and bequest to family members, but cannot as yet sell. In theory, the state plans to turn these lots into real and sellable marketable commodities. In practice, Chubuk says, the state encourages former Soviet-era collective farm chairmen to maintain their manors as some kind of primordial latifundia—huge estates, run mostly with servile labor, like in ancient Rome.

Some 40,000 Ukrainian farmer families are losing the desperate fight against the latifundia managers who pay their village workforce three times less than a farmer, or do not pay at all. Latifundia welcome investors who can provide equipment and fuel. As a result, some five to six people till 50,000 hectares, while the rest stay unemployed, which creates the usual range of social problems. As a rule, a couple of years later, an investor walks out anyway. It would be more productive to turn the land over from latifundia to farming families, insists Chubuk—but they won't give the land to the peasants.

The government says it has issued parcel certificates for 87% of the arable land, says Chubuk, "but we have not had a single such certificate over here." No matter what they say in the capital, local authorities do whatever they please to protect their power and vested interests, he believes. Will things get better, once the land really becomes marketable, and farmers can buy and sell it? Isn't the real private property for land the right solution? Haven't farmers always fought for that?

"Selling land now would be a tragedy," says Chubuk. "It can't be done now, not under this corrupt regime and all-pervading poverty." He fears hungry and poor peasants will sell their land for peanuts, and end up with neither the land nor the money. "It should have been done ten years ago, before the people were robbed of their savings by inflation and the string of crises," says Chubuk. "It might be done when things improve. But not now." Chubuk sips his coffee and says sarcastically: "Never have thought I'd speak as a communist. But this is what they have driven us to by their decade of reform." Miroslav Popovich, a city intellectual, shares the view of farmers: there is no mortgage system, he says. There is no money. The village exists by renting its land. Selling land today will be counterproductive and dangerous, he believes.

So what happens next? Now, Chubuk believes, the people are subject to economic violence. Should this go on, political violence will follow—and not just on the part of the state. "No work, no income, no hope turn people into rabble—and easy prey for rabble-rousers," says Chubuk. A shift to a cash-free economy, and prospects of a peasant revolt, however ephemeral, mark a sad entry into the 21st century for a European country that acquired its independence a decade ago.