Virgin Lands campaign
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,[1][2] and the campaign had led to an environmental disaster for Kazakhstan steppe due to significant soil erosion.
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's plan both expanded the reforms that Malenkov had begun and proposed the plowing and cultivation of 13 million hectares (130,000 km2) of previously uncultivated land by 1956.
[5] Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and other leading CPSU members expressed opposition to the Virgin Lands campaign.
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.
[8] Overall, the Virgin Lands campaign succeeded in increasing production of grain and in alleviating food shortages in the short term.
Khrushchev was forced to acknowledge the validity of some of the opposing viewpoints regarding the Virgin Lands campaign but he maintained that as long as two harvests in a five-year period were good, the plan would be a success in terms of recovering costs and making a profit.
[8] Khrushchev organized one of the most important Virgin Lands regions into an administrative unit called Tseliny Krai, a territory consisting of five provinces in northern Kazakhstan.
The poor living conditions caused many workers to quickly pack up and leave within the first months to years of arriving in the Virgin Lands.
While the food shortages in Virgin Land settlements were solved by 1956, the housing problem remained an issue past the end of the 1950s.
[9] As a consequence of the poor living conditions and constant out-migration, there were shortages of workers on the new Virgin Land state farms.
As a short-term solution, the government began paying about 250,000 experienced farmers per year from southern regions of Kazakhstan to come to work in the Virgin Lands after they completed their own harvests.
The area got only 200 to 350 mm of rain yearly and the majority tended to fall in July and August, when the grain was ripening and at harvest time, whereas drought usually occurred in spring when the immature shoots needed the most water.
The intensive monoculture farming of the Virgin Lands campaign, with 83% of the total cropland in 1958–1959 being covered by grain, depleted the soil of necessary nutrients.
[citation needed] Very little infrastructure existed in the Virgin Land provinces prior to Khrushchev's announcement of the campaign.
Furthermore, lack of storage facilities caused farmers to hastily harvest the entire crop during suitable weather, leading to ripe and unripe grain often being mixed together.
