Soviet Union Donations Gladly Accepted

By Richard Lacayo

With the Soviet Union facing its most miserable winter since the end of World War II, Mikhail Gorbachev told his countrymen last week that he and the Communist leadership were "guilty before the working class" for his nation's food shortages. But what the Soviet people need these days are calories, not confessions.

Even a nation accustomed for some time to meager supplies and long lines has been stunned by the utter disappearance of milk, meat, produce and even bread. Some stores have taken to closing early in the day for lack of anything to sell. To halt worsening shortages, Leningrad took the dramatic step of introducing rationing of key staples last week. Moscow is also debating emergency measures. The Supreme Soviet has given Gorbachev until the end of this week to come up with a plan to halt shortages in major industrial areas. Addressing a meeting of the Moscow City Communist Party, Gorbachev offered some relief by announcing that he had brokered deals with three Soviet republics -- Estonia, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine -- to rush dairy products to Moscow and Leningrad. He also issued a decree setting up workers' control committees to prevent hoarding, waste and profiteering.

The problem is not food supply -- for one thing, the U.S.S.R. had a record grain crop this year -- but distribution. Farmers have been holding back produce from the state, hoping to make more lucrative cash and barter deals elsewhere. A crumbling transportation system has left crops rotting in the fields or in warehouses. Soviet citizens grumble that many of the delays are deliberate, the work of diehard local bureaucrats seeking to undermine Gorbachev. The very fact that many Soviets have been stockpiling foodstuffs at home, though it provides them a cushion against the future, has only added to the sense of shortages in the stores.

As he scrambles to get food from farm to table, Gorbachev has been forced to appeal to the outside world for help. At the summit meeting of Western leaders in Paris last month, he took aside European heads one by one to emphasize his plight. Nowhere did the message get through more clearly than in Germany, where a national campaign to deliver food assistance is being directed by the government and private organizations. Last week more than 100,000 food parcels -- each containing enough coffee, sugar, rice, powdered milk, cheese and canned meat to feed one person for two weeks -- were shipped to the Soviet Union. During a one-hour television broadcast called Helft Russland (Help Russia), which aired last week throughout Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl appealed for donations. Kohl reminded his countrymen that Gorbachev "helped us Germans on the way to unity in the last decisive months."

The relief operation is shaping up as the biggest assistance effort conducted in Germany since the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49, when the Western Allies saved the city from Soviet strangulation. Ironically, among the supplies to be sent to the U.S.S.R. will be 300,000 tons of powdered staples and canned foods that had been stockpiled in Berlin against another such blockade -- a trove whose existence had been a secret for 40 years until the current crisis brought it to light.

Germans acted out of a mixture of motives: simple generosity, gratitude to Gorbachev, even a touch of guilt -- German CARE, a descendant of the postwar American relief program, addressed its shipments to cities like Kiev and Smolensk that had suffered most from Hitler's aggression during World War II. They also are worried that unless the food crisis is brought under control, Western Europe will face a flood of Soviet refugees. Nations along the Soviet border from Scandinavia to Czechoslovakia are bracing for that possibility. Fearing instability, Poland last week even decided to beef up its troop deployments along the Soviet border.

The spectacle of Gorbachev facing the anger of a hungry nation has led George Bush to decide that he is ready to consider asking Congress to waive the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which bars Moscow from most-favored-nation trading status until freer emigration is allowed. Though Gorbachev has greatly loosened emigration restrictions, the Administration has insisted that the new policy must be written into law before trade limitations can be lifted.

Meanwhile, a committee of officials from the departments of State, Treasury and Defense, as well as the Agency for International Development, is identifying the neediest areas and the available resources of food and transport. The plan, whose details are still secret, is to send supplies directly to the areas thought to be the hardest hit, including cities in Siberia and the Urals, as well as Moscow and Leningrad.

One stumbling block is how to get the food to the Soviet Union. The planes and ships that would normally be available are being used to airlift troops and equipment to the Persian Gulf. Mindful that much of the foreign aid sent to Armenia after the 1988 earthquake ended up on the black market, U.S. officials are also wondering how to ensure that food gets to the people who need it. Says one: "We would like to handle the distribution ourselves." As far as some Soviets are concerned, that would be just fine. As Victor Shinkaretsky, a Russian Deputy, put it last week, "As long as we are forced to beg for a foreign piece of bread with butter, let's invite in those who not only know how to produce but also how to distribute."

With reporting by James O. Jackson/Bonn and John Kohan/Moscow