THE VIRGIN LANDS CAMPAIGN

What was Khrushchev's major agricultural initiative?

Khrushchev's major initiative was his Virgin Lands campaign (the first harvest was in 1954).

What was the Virgin Lands campaign?

The Virgin Lands campaign was a huge operation designed to plough up a vast tract of virgin and fallow land in Kazakhstan, the Urals and Siberia for grain cultivation.

How many Komsomol volunteers were mobilised for the Virgin Lands campaign?

More than 300,000 Komsomol volunteers were mobilised to settle and cultivate this huge area – by 1956, 35.9 million acres, an area equal to the total cultivated area of Canada.

What were conditions like in the Virgin Lands campaign?

Conditions were primitive and the climate harsh. Like the Five-Year Plans it was run like a military campaign with an emphasis on speed.

What did Eduard Shevardnadze recall about the Virgin Lands campaign in his memoir?

Shevardnadze recalled machinery brought from all over the country breaking down, crops left to rot and nowhere to store the grain. There was a colossal waste of billions of roubles, machinery and labour. The virgin lands cost the country dearly.

What was the harvest in 1956?

The harvest in 1956, announced as a great victory, was the largest in Soviet history up to that point: over half of the 125 million tons of grain produced came from the new regions.

What problems emerged in the Virgin Lands by the early 1960s?

By the early 1960s, reliance on single-crop cultivation had taken its toll on the fertility of the soil, and failure to adopt anti-erosion measures led to millions of tons of topsoil simply blowing away. In 1960 this happened to 13,000 square miles of land.