Virgin Lands Campaign

Background and motives

The campaign grew out of a severe grain shortage at the end of the Stalin era: 31.1 million tons of grain were procured in 1953, while 32.4 million tons were consumed for food supply, livestock and other state needs, forcing the state to draw down its reserves (P143). Its core idea was to increase output by bringing vast unplowed and fallow lands into cultivation rather than by raising yields on land already farmed (P47).

On 30 November 1953 P. P. Lobanov, deputy chairman of the RSFSR Council of Ministers and RSFSR agriculture minister, sent Khrushchev a memo titled "On increasing grain production through the plowing of new lands," recommending that the most convenient parts of 57.6 million hectares of arable land in the RSFSR be brought under cultivation (P51). On 4 December 1953 the USSR agriculture minister Ivan Benediktov followed with a memo that attributed the grain deficit to low yields and to the conversion of sown area into pasture, and proposed bringing 30 million hectares of unplowed land into grain and fodder production, starting with a 12-million-hectare rotation plan and forecasting an extra 8-9 million tons of grain, rising to 14-16 million tons by 1960 (P52). Khrushchev then submitted his own memo "Ways of solving the grain problem" to the CPSU Presidium on 22 January 1954, attaching both ministry documents and proposing a far more ambitious two-year target of 13 million hectares and 18-19 million tons of grain (P53).

Adoption

On 25 January 1954 the Presidium debated the plan. Malenkov, Molotov and Voroshilov argued for directing resources to the restoration of old cultivated land in central and northwestern RSFSR, but the majority backed the virgin lands program and referred it to a Central Committee plenum (P54). The February-March 1954 plenum adopted the resolution "On the further increase of grain production in the country and on the cultivation of virgin and fallow lands" (P61), setting the target of bringing at least 13 million hectares under cultivation in 1954-1955 and obtaining 1,100-1,200 million poods of grain from them in 1955, including 800-900 million poods of marketable grain (P149). A further CPSU Central Committee and USSR Council of Ministers resolution on increasing grain production through the cultivation of virgin and fallow lands followed on 27 March 1954 (P65).

Mobilisation and organisation

On 22 February 1954 Khrushchev addressed Soviet youth on television and called on them to go and break in the virgin lands (P154). In the summer of 1954 alone, 300,000 Komsomol volunteers traveled to the Virgin Lands (P6), and more than a million young men and women eventually became virgin-landers (P84). Recruits received material incentives: a 15 percent wage supplement for workers of the newly established state farms (P153), migration costs and a one-off payment equal to three months' salary, and, for rural youth, the prospect of obtaining a passport (P156).

The plenum decree also set higher plowing norms with shorter deadlines, gave priority to state farms in breaking the virgin lands, and dropped benefits for collective farms (P55, P58). The campaign marked an institutional preference for state-owned grain farms (sovkhozy) (P196). Between 1954 and 1961 the virgin lands absorbed 20 percent of all Soviet agricultural investment, and the agricultural development of Russia's traditional farming regions was seriously slowed as a result (P68).

Results and crisis

Results were dramatic at first: the 1954 harvest exceeded expectations by 65 percent over the 1949-1953 average for the region (P10), and the 1956 harvest was the most successful of the whole campaign and the largest in Soviet history up to that point (P14). Across the USSR, the grain harvest rose from 85.5 million tons in 1954, of which 27.1 million tons came from the virgin lands, to 125 million tons in 1960, of which 58.7 million tons came from the virgin lands (P82). Kazakhstan delivered its first "billion poods" of grain in 1956 and was awarded the Order of Lenin (P157).

Yields, however, did not meet the plan's assumptions. Grain yields in the virgin lands swung from 9.3 centners per hectare in 1954 to 2.8 in 1955, 11.4 in 1956 and 4.3 in 1957, and weeds reduced the quality of virgin-lands grain (P158). In 1955 Kazakhstan received only one-tenth of its normal rainfall and Virgin Lands grain output there fell 35 percent below 1954 (P12). Dryland conditions, high soil salinity and monoculture farming depleted soil nutrients, a major cause of the productivity decline after 1959; according to some accounts the decline set in after the 1958 harvest, and yields never again approached the 1956 record (P24, P32).

In 1960 five provinces of northern Kazakhstan were united into Tselinny Krai, with Akmolinsk renamed Tselinograd; the new administrative unit held Kokchetav, Kustanai, Pavlodar, North Kazakhstan and Tselinograd provinces, where Russians made up 45.2 percent and Kazakhs 18.7 percent of the population (P71, P161). More than 6 million people moved to Kazakhstan permanently during the campaign (P161).

In 1962 about 7 million hectares in Kazakhstan were exposed to soil erosion (P158), and in 1962-1963 dust storms in the virgin lands and the Kazakh steppe became a real disaster (P73). In 1965 wind erosion reached Altai Krai, Bashkiria, Kalmykia and the Volga region beyond Kazakhstan itself (P158). From the mid-1960s, soil-protective cultivation methods were introduced and a grain-farming research institute in Tselinograd worked on the problem (P158).

Legacy

In the long run, the campaign permanently reshaped the region's economy: even in 1998 wheat was sown on almost twice as many hectares as in 1953 in northern Kazakhstan, and the republic remains one of the world's largest wheat producers (P7).