RL 297/91 August 19, 1991 PROFILE OF COUP LEADER VASILII STARODUBTSEV Don Van Atta Since 1989, Vasilii Starodubtsev has emerged as the principal spokesman for opposition to any kind of marketization, privatization, or land reform among Soviet farm managers. The membership of the Peasants' Union, which he leads, has become progressively narrower as advocates of peasant farming, individual farmers, and less hard-line farm managers have left it. On August 19, Starodubtsev was named as one of the organizers of the coup seeking to depose Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. At the press conference on August 19 at which the State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR introduced and justified its attempt to take over the USSR by force, committee member Vasilii Starodubtsev was asked whether the peasants would support the coup. His answer was that the peasantry had suffered more than any other group under perestroika and that they would support the restoration of order.1 Starodubtsev's claim was reminiscent of the remarks made by his mentor Egor Ligachev in the USSR Congress of People's Deputies two years ago. "Peasants in the villages," he affirmed, "are engaged in work and in creation. Fortunately, they are not striking and they are not rallying."2 Starodubtsev was on the Emergency Committee as the representative of the peasantry. As chairman of the USSR Peasants' Union and the RSFSR Agrarian Union, Starodubtsev heads national organizations that claim to represent the entire agrarian sector. At its first congress, in June, 1990, the Peasants' Union presented "a list of immediate measures for the rebirth of the peasantry and its economic, social, and legal welfare." The first demand was for the adoption of a special law guaranteeing the union's rights and privileges as the representative of agrarian interests. Next the union demanded that sales prices for farm goods and prices charged for agricultural inputs be set only after they had been agreed by the appropriate state agency and the Peasants' Union; further, the union demanded for itself the right to set general policy for the supply of equipment and chemicals used in agriculture. (Such a demand, if granted, would have replaced the state monopoly of supply with a "private" monopoly held by the Peasants' Union.) The union went on to call on the state to restore the old system of mobilizing students and urban workers to help with agricultural work at busy times of the year. The state was to "confirm" the legal status and rights of farm managers, presumably taking the right of appointing managers away from local Communist Party committees but also threatening the collective farmers' (seldom-exercised) right to freely elect the chairman of their cooperative. Finally, the Peasants' Union asked that its chairman (Starodubtsev) be made a member of the USSR Presidential Council and that its first deputy chairman become a member of the USSR government (presumably as a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, as is the chairman of the State Commission on Food Supplies and Procurements).3 In October, 1990, as the RSFSR government prepared land reform measures, Starodubtsev threatened that the peasants would "shake the world" if the demands of the Peasants' Union for price parity, representation, and no forced breakup of collective farms were not met.4 A year later, at the Peasants' Union's second congress in June, 1991, some rank-and-file members called for the union to be replaced by a democratic peasants' political party. Starodubtsev, however, called for the imposition of a state of emergency in the country to preserve peasants' interests.5 A month later, he joined Emergency Committee member Aleksandr Tizyakov, the first deputy ministers of defense and internal affairs, and other hard-liners in signing a manifesto openly calling for a military coup.6 Who is Starodubtsev? Vasilii Starodubtsev has for many years been chairman of the Lenin Kolkhoz in Novomoskovsky Raion, Tula Oblast. The farm has long been a model of successful collective farming and was at the heart of the first raionwide agroindustrial association, the "Novomoskovskoe" Agroindustrial Association, which was founded in April, 1987. Starodubtsev's patron, Viktor Nikonov, who at that time held the post of CPSU Central Committee secretary for agriculture, attended the inaugural ceremonies.7 Designed to function as a single economic unit, an agroindustrial association is a districtwide organization of collective farms, state farms, and agricultural service and processing organizations. Starodubtsev's association, which is counterposed to individual peasant farming and marketization of agricultural supply and procurements, is yet another in the long series of attempts to streamline agricultural organization that date back to Nikita Khrushchev's Territorial-Production Administration and include the raion agroindustrial associations established as part of the Food Program in 1982. Since 1989, Starodubtsev has become the principal spokesman for opposition to any kind of marketization, privatization, or land reform among Soviet farm managers. The Peasants' Union that he leads has become progressively narrower in its membership as less hard-line farm managers, as well as advocates of peasant farming and individual farmers, have left it. Does Starodubtsev Speak for the Peasantry? Starodubtsev's union claims to represent agrarian interests. It has a countrywide organization, often based on the Communist Party's own local apparatus. Not all farm managers share Starodubtsev's views, of course. Arkadii Veprev, chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet Committee on Agricultural and Food Supplies, has, for example, supported privatization. So too has Albert Kauls, former chairman of the Latvian model farm "Adazhi" and a member of Mikhail Gorbachev's now disbanded Presidential Council.8 It is difficult to determine how strong support for Starodubtsev's position is in the countryside. In the Soviet economy of shortages, farm managers may find it advantageous to belong to the Peasants' Union since it controls access to many essential production inputs and seems to enjoy the support of many local Communist Party officials who are in a position to punish farm managers who do not toe the line. In similar fashion, farm managers have many levers to extort a show of support for the Peasants' Union from farm workers and collective farm members. It is, of course, dangerous to generalize about a territory as large as the RSFSR, to say nothing of the USSR. It can nonetheless be safely said that those employed on farms in the Russian Federation are becoming more and more internally divided. On the one hand, there are rank-and-file farmers, many of whom are older, female, and unskilled. Such workers tend to support the existing system because they fear any change would eliminate the few social benefits, such as old-age pensions, that they now receive from the farms. On the other hand, there are younger specialists who wish to break out of the old structures. These workers tend to favor either the privatization of agriculture or the establishment of so-called associations of peasants' farms. These last are represented by the Association of Peasant Farms and Agricultural Cooperatives of Russia (AKKOR). The association claims local organizations throughout the RSFSR and is built into the structure of the RSFSR State Committee on Land Reform, the agency charged with recreating peasant farms in the USSR. The president of AKKOR, Vladimir Bashmachnikov, is a deputy chairman of the RSFSR Committee on Land Reform. AKKOR is far from united--many but by no means all of its members support the policies of Yurii Chernichenko's Peasant Party of Russia--but it does seem to be the only organization that has any hope of challenging the alliance of the CPSU and the Peasants' Union in the countryside. The timing of the coup was clearly influenced by the imminent signing of the new Union treaty and President Gorbachev's absence on holiday. For Starodubtsev, however, other considerations are likely to have made the need for a restoration of authoritarian rule seem equally urgent. At this time of year, state and collective farms need to be able to mobilize city workers to get their harvests in. If last year's harvest losses are repeated, many big farms, now forced to operate as profit-making enterprises, will find themselves facing bankruptcy. Likewise, the growing power of AKKOR, the Peasants' Party, and other organizations threatens the farm managers' hold over their peasants. For Starodubtsev, as for his colleagues on the Emergency Committee, the imposition of a state of emergency in the RSFSR may well have seemed the only chance to preserve his own power and the power of the managers and apparatchiks his union represents. But, if the peasants really supported Starodubtsev, surely he would have had no need to resort to force to make his voice heard. ^ Don Van Atta is an assistant professor of government at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York. 1 CNN, August 19, 1991. 2 Speech delivered by Ligachev on December 13, 1989, to the second session of the USSR Congress of People's Deputies (Izvestia, December 15, 1989). 3 "Zayavlenie uchreditel'nogo s"ezda Krest'yanskogo soyuza SSSR" and "Perechen' neotlozhnykh mer po vozrozhdeniyu krest'yanstva, ego ekonomicheskoi, sotsial'noi, i pravovoi zashchishchennosti," Sel'skaya zhizn', July 27, 1990; Valerii Gavrichkin, "Politichesky dnevnik: Urozhai, zabastovka, chrezvychainye mery," Izvestia, August 7, 1990. 4 S. Chudakov, "Vasilii Starodubtsev: 'Ya--protivnik krainykh mer,'" Sel'skaya zhizn', October 17, 1990. On the RSFSR land reform measures, see Don Van Atta, "First Results of the 'Stolypin' Land Reform in the RSFSR," Report on the USSR, No. 29, 1991, pp. 17-22. 5 E. Yakovleva, "Vvedite voiska, i my narkomim strany," Komsomol'skaya pravda, June 20, 1991. 6 Sovetskaya Rossiya, July 23, 1991. 7 "Po puti integratsii," Pravda, April 11, 1987. 8 Igor' Gamiunov, "Zigzag sud'by," Literaturnaya gazeta, July 17, 1991.