Virgin Lands Campaign

The Virgin Lands Campaign (Russian: Освое́ние целины́, Osvoenie Tseliny) 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 populace. In September 1953, the Central Committee plenum – composed of Khrushchev, two aids, 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 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 began and proposed that 13 million hectares (130,000 km2) of previously uncultivated land be plowed and cultivated by 1956. This land was located on the right bank of the Volga, the northern Caucasus, Western Siberia, and Northern Kazakhstan. The Kazakhstan party leader at the time of Khrushchev’s announcement, Rakhmizhan Shayakhmetov, played down the potential yields of Virgin Lands in Kazakhstan. He did not want Kazakh land under Russian control. Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and other leading party members expressed opposition to the Virgin Lands Campaign. Many believed the plan was not economically or logistically feasible. Malenkov preferred initiatives to make the land already under cultivation more productive, but Khrushchev insisted that bringing huge amounts of new land under cultivation was the only way to get a major increase in crop yields in a short amount of time.

Instead of bribing peasants with monetary compensation, Khrushchev’s strategy to recruit workers for the new virgin lands was to advertise 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 28-30 million hectares (280,000-300,000 km2). Between the years 1954 and 1958, 30.7 million rubles were spent on the Virgin Lands Campaign and during the same time the state procured 48.8 billion rubles worth of grain. From 1954 to 1960, the total sown area of land in the USSR increased by 46 million hectares, 90% of which was part of the Virgin Lands Campaign.

Overall, the Virgin Lands Campaign succeeded in increasing production of grain and alleviating food shortages in the short term. The enormous scale and initial success of the campaign were quite a historical feat. However, the wide fluctuations in grain output year to year, the failure of the Virgin Lands to surpass the record output of 1956, and the gradual decline in yields following 1959 mark the Virgin Lands Campaign as a failure and surely fell short of Khrushchev’s ambition to surpass American grain output by 1960.