Everything about Virgin Lands Campaign totally explained
The
Virgin Lands Campaign was an initiative by
Nikita Khrushchev to open up vast tracts of unseeded (virgin)
steppe in the northern
Kazakh SSR and the
Altay region of the
Russian SFSR, started in
1954.
In the first year of the programme, 190,000 km² were
ploughed up, and in
1955, an extra 140,000 km² were ploughed. With all this new land, a vast number of people would need to be brought in from all over the
Soviet Union: the
Komsomol was charged with recruiting them.
More than 300,000 people, mostly
Ukrainians and
Russians, arrived in the Virgin Lands to begin new lives as
farmers. Hundreds of thousands of
soldiers,
students and
combine harvester operators would join them; however, these people would stay for only a year's
harvest. By the end of the mass
immigrations to the Virgin Lands,
Slavs outnumbered
Kazakhs in many areas. The main town was renamed
Tselinograd, "Virgin Lands City" (today's
Astana).
For a brief time, Khrushchev inspired a
communist zeal in the peoples of the Soviet Union, and concentrated that zeal on a task that, for an equally brief time, produced the expected results.
The first harvest
The first harvest on the Virgin Lands, in
1956, was a stunning success. Of the 125 million
tonnes of
grain produced in the
Soviet Union that year, more than half of it came from one eighth of the country. The Soviet Union was producing,
per capita, twice as much wheat as the
West. However, harvests would never again reach the level of 1956.
Failures
Nearly all of the
collective farms in the Virgin Lands grew one crop alone:
wheat. By the
1960s, the
soil had been drained of all its
nutrients beneficial to wheat, and before long, due to lack of any measures to prevent
erosion, much of that soil was simply being blown away by the
wind to leave bare, useless steppe behind.
Also, much of the crop that could be harvested was wasted, as there were not enough
storage silos, so it had to be thrown away.
Therefore despite the initial success of the Virgin Lands Campaign, the Soviet Union was forced to buy grain from
Canada to meet its needs.
Legacy
Even after the end of the campaign,
about six million Russian and Ukrainian inhabitants remained in the
Kazakh SSR. Their number begun to decrease after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, because of the
emigration of the Slavs back to their respective countries.
A
minor planet 2111 Tselina discovered in 1969 by
Soviet astronomer
Tamara Mikhailovna Smirnova is named to commemorate the 25th anniversary of virgin soil development in the
USSR.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Virgin Lands Campaign'.
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