An offer of free potatoes for anyone who helps gather them has enticed thousands of city dwellers into the fields and reduced the chances of hunger this winter, Soviet officials said Thursday. Two weeks ago, newspapers and television broadcasts warned that the harvest was proceeding very slowly and Moscow had stockpiled only 7 percent of the potatoes it would need to get through the winter. Fear of hunger spread through the capital, and consumers emptied grocery shelves, stashing sacks of potatoes in closets and basements. Since then, emergency measures - including ordering soldiers into the fields and offering to let volunteers keep half the potatoes they dig up - has doubled and even tripled the rate of the harvest in many areas, according to official reports. ``True, the weather has brightened up a bit, but the main thing is the massive turnout of (voluntary) helpers,'' Gennady Kulik, deputy prime minister of the Russian republic, said on the main television news program, Vremya. Vremya reported 160,000 Moscow residents, including 40,000 soldiers, were working in the fields. It showed city dwellers pulling potatoes from the soil and placing them in buckets - one for the state, then one for themselves. The TV report appeared aimed at reducing the crisis atmosphere as the country heads into winter amid economic confusion and shortages of many essential goods, ranging from gasoline to sausage, tobacco and paper. After weeks of debate, the national legislature is still trying to reach consensus on a plan to switch from central planning to a market-based system. President Mikhail S. Gorbachev initially endorsed a radical 500-day plan, then hesitated on whether to allow private ownership of farms, which he said should be decided by a national referendum. Thursday's upbeat TV broadcast said 75 percent of the Soviet Union's potato plantations have been harvested, and 40-50 percent of the planned allocation has been sent to industrial centers. Kulik said several cities, including Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Perm, already have filled their vegetable storage facilities and are fully provisioned for winter. He said Moscow has nearly finished stockpiling beets and is likely to get more carrots than planned. The city also has received 50,000 of the 165,000 tons of cabbage it is expected to use during the winter, and the cabbage harvest ``is going well,'' he said. The TV report did not say what percentage of Moscow's potato allocation was in hand. But Kulik said deliveries were arriving from across Russia, the largest of the Soviet Union's 15 republics, and ``measures are being taken to fully provide the capital'' with potatoes. A bumper crop of wheat also is being harvested, but much of it is expected to rot or go to waste because of poor transportation and inefficient bakeries. Last month, bread was in short supply in Moscow for the first time since the early 1960s. A crash program to raise bakers' wages and put bakeries back in operation eliminated the bread lines within weeks.
