300px|thumbnail|USSR postage stamp of 1979, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Virgin Lands campaign
The Virgin Lands campaign was Nikita Khrushchev's 1953 plan to dramatically boost the Soviet Union's agricultural production in order to alleviate the food shortages plaguing the Soviet population.
Hundreds of thousands of young volunteers settled and farmed areas of Western Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan and considerably changed its demographics. While the scheme was initially successful, later the output decreased considerably, and the campaign led to an environmental disaster for Kazakhstan steppe due to significant soil erosion.
History
In September 1953 a Central Committee group – composed of Khrushchev, two aides, two Pravda editors, and one agricultural specialist – met to determine the severity of the agricultural crisis in the Soviet Union. Earlier in 1953, Georgy Malenkov had received credit for introducing reforms to solve the agricultural problem in the country, including increasing the procurement prices the state paid for collective-farm deliveries, reducing taxes, and encouraging individual peasant plots. Khrushchev, irritated that Malenkov had received credit for agricultural reform, introduced his own agricultural plan. Khrushchev's plan both expanded the reforms that Malenkov had begun and proposed the plowing and cultivation of 13 million hectares (130,000 km) of previously uncultivated land by 1956. Targeted lands included areas on the right bank of the Volga, in the northern Caucasus, in Western Siberia, and in Northern Kazakhstan. The First Secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party at the time of Khrushchev's announcement, Zhumabay Shayakhmetov, played down the potential yields of the virgin lands in Kazakhstan: he did not want Kazakh land under Russian control.
Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and other leading CPSU members expressed opposition to the Virgin Lands campaign. Many saw the plan as not economically or logistically feasible. Malenkov preferred initiatives to make the land already under cultivation more productive, but Khrushchev insisted on bringing huge amounts of new land under cultivation as the only way to get a major increase in crop yields in a short amount of time.
Instead of offering incentives to peasants already working in collective farms, Khrushchev planned to recruit workers for the new virgin lands by advertising the opportunity as a socialist adventure for Soviet youth. During the summer of 1954, 300,000 Komsomol volunteers traveled to the Virgin Lands. Following the rapid Virgin-Land cultivation and excellent harvest of 1954, Khrushchev raised the original goal of 13 million new hectares of land under cultivation by 1956 to between 28 and 30 million hectares (280,000–300,000 km). Between the years 1954 and 1958 the Soviet Union spent 30.7 million Rbls on the Virgin Lands campaign and during the same time the state procured 48.8 billion Rbls worth of grain. From 1954 to 1960, the total sown area of land in the USSR increased by 46 million hectares, with 90% of the increase due to the Virgin Lands campaign. In historical perspective, however, the campaign marked a permanent shift in the North-Kazakhstani economy. Even at the 1998 nadir, wheat was sown on almost twice as many hectares as in 1953, and Kazakhstan is currently one of the world's largest producers of wheat.
Yearly Virgin Land performance
1954
The first Virgin Land harvest exceeded expectations. The total output of grain for Virgin Land regions in 1954 was 14,793,000 tons greater and 65% higher than the average grain yield for the period of 1949–1953. By the start of 1955, 200,000 tractors had been sent to the Virgin Lands, 425 new sovkhozy had been created, and a total of 30 million hectares (300,000 km) of land had been ploughed up, 20 million of which were put under crop.
- In movies: The First Echelon (1955), Ivan Brovkin on the State Farm (1959)
- Virgin Lands was the third part of Brezhnev's trilogy, a series of memoirs of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (although most likely written by government-attached journalists).
See also
- Agriculture in the Soviet Union
- Great Leap Forward, contemporary program in the People's Republic of China
- Heat, a 1963 film
- Menıñ Qazaqstanym
- Rationing in the Soviet Union
- Tanganyika groundnut scheme, a failed 1950s agricultural program in the British Empire
- Twenty-five-thousander