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1. Did the Virgin Lands Scheme change Soviet Agriculture?
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Russia – The Rule of Nikita Khrushchev, 1953-64
In this course, Dr Robert Hornsby (University of Leeds) discusses the rule of Nikita Khrushchev from 1953-1964. In the first lecture, we explore Khrushchev’s agricultural policy, moving away from Stalin’s collectivisation, instead establishing the Virgin Lands Scheme and Corn Campaign to increase harvests. In the second lecture, we investigate the Space Race, looking at the ways in which the USSR overtook the US and utilised these advances to improve the perception of the Soviet Union at home and abroad. Third, we consider how policy regarding religious freedom shifted under Khrushchev, as a rejuvenation of religious repression runs counter to established narratives that ‘the Thaw’ represented new freedom. In the fourth lecture, we delve into the reconstitution of the secret police, as the Stalinist terror state was transformed into a strict police state. Finally, in the fifth, we discuss the fall of Khrushchev with his disposition in 1964, and the rise of his successor, Leonid Brezhnev.
1. Did the Virgin Lands Scheme change Soviet Agriculture?
In this module, we think about agriculture under Khrushchev, focussing on: (i)the severe agricultural challenges post-WWII, with widespread hunger and poorly compensated collective farmers, and the reforms after 1953 to address these issues; (ii)the successes and failures of Khrushchev's Virgin Lands Scheme; (iii) the ultimate failure of the American inspired Corn Campaign, and Khrushchev's decision to buy grain from the West.
Hi. My name is doctor Robert Hornsby.
00:00:06I'm associate professor in modern European history at the
00:00:08University of Leeds,
00:00:11and I specialize primarily in history of the post Stalin
00:00:12Soviet Union.
00:00:16I want to talk first today about the Virgin Lands scheme.
00:00:17And really to begin with the Virgin Lands,
00:00:21we need to understand some of the context behind the scheme.
00:00:23And in particular,
00:00:26some very important context is the fact that the Soviet Union
00:00:28and before Soviet times,
00:00:31the Russian empire is a country which has suffered
00:00:32some very severe and extensive famines over the years.
00:00:35In the nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties,
00:00:38in the second half of the nineteen forties,
00:00:41millions of people have starved to death.
00:00:43These have partly been caused by natural disasters and partly
00:00:46by regime policy.
00:00:49And in particular,
00:00:51I suppose you would say regime indifference to the kind of
00:00:51suffering of the masses in this context.
00:00:55Late Stalinism, so this is post war.
00:00:58Late Stalinism is a time when agriculture is close to ruination.
00:01:01That peasants are very hungry,
00:01:07lots of collective farmers are essentially,
00:01:08surviving solely by what they produce.
00:01:12They're not paid for years on end.
00:01:14In some cases, People are trying to flee the villages.
00:01:15This all leaves agriculture in a very depressed and desperate
00:01:19state in the Soviet Union.
00:01:22Now following Stalin's death in nineteen fifty three, things do
00:01:25start to change quickly.
00:01:29So Nikita Khrushchev and Georgi Malenkov,
00:01:30these are two of the principal successors.
00:01:33They very quickly realized that agriculture needs reform,
00:01:36and they start to raise the prices that the regime pays to
00:01:39farmers for the grain that they're obliged to deliver.
00:01:42And they also cancel some of the debts of collective farms.
00:01:45So there is an initial move to kind of improve the situation in agriculture.
00:01:48However,
00:01:54by the end of nineteen fifty three,
00:01:56it's starting to become clear that there may well be another
00:01:58famine on the horizon in nineteen fifty four.
00:02:01And what Khrushchev starts to work on,
00:02:04and this is very much Khrushchev's policy,
00:02:06he starts to work on kind of breaking the cycle of famine,
00:02:09of improving Soviet agriculture in the long term.
00:02:12And this is very much a policy area which tells us a lot
00:02:17about Nikita Khrushchev as Soviet leader.
00:02:20He's someone who is inclined towards kind of big gestures.
00:02:23He believes if you put enough energy and determination into
00:02:28something, you can fix most problems.
00:02:31He's not somebody who works through the fine details,
00:02:33who who kind of accepts a great deal of nuance.
00:02:36He thinks if you try, you can do it.
00:02:39And essentially, the idea of the virgin land scheme is to open up new land for cultivation.
00:02:42He says, our country will feed itself by simply opening more
00:02:48unused land for farming.
00:02:53And the amount of land involved is truly massive.
00:02:55He talks firstly about,
00:02:58thirty million hectares and then later that's raised to
00:03:00forty million hectares.
00:03:03And this is land primarily in the south of Siberia and the
00:03:04north of Kazakhstan.
00:03:08For context, it's worth saying that the total land area of the UK is
00:03:10about twenty five million hectares.
00:03:14So this is an absolutely massive amount of land.
00:03:16There's a point worth making here, which is that,
00:03:21in terms of agricultural policy,
00:03:23what Khrushchev is doing is he's extending the amount of
00:03:25land rather than improving the way that the Soviet
00:03:28agricultural economy works.
00:03:31This is problematic for reasons that we'll go into in due course.
00:03:34And the way that they decide to open up all this new land
00:03:38primarily is by calling on young people to volunteer,
00:03:41to go out to Kazakhstan and to Siberia,
00:03:44and basically start digging up the land,
00:03:48start building new collective farms.
00:03:50This is all presented as a sort of a heroic chance to do your
00:03:53bit for building communism.
00:03:56And actually, this part of the plan is quite the success.
00:03:58So at first, Khrushchev talks about having, say,
00:04:01three hundred thousand volunteers heading out east,
00:04:04and they do primarily come from the western part of the Soviet
00:04:08Union and head east.
00:04:11And people flock to registration points.
00:04:13Huge numbers of people partly sign up because they see this
00:04:15as the sort of patriotic thing to do.
00:04:19Some sign up for money.
00:04:22The wages are not good, but there are wages.
00:04:23And some see this as kind of their chance to join the
00:04:26communist path to the future.
00:04:29So the Virgin Lands program actually lasts for for quite a
00:04:32few years, a decade or so.
00:04:35But really most of the interest is in the first couple of years.
00:04:37This is when most of the action is going on.
00:04:40And for those who sign up,
00:04:43there's a real mixture of experiences going on.
00:04:45Some people just have an absolute hell of a time and
00:04:48flee very quickly, because they're often living in tents,
00:04:51they're in very harsh conditions.
00:04:54Some of it is is pretty much lawlessness, to be honest.
00:04:57There's sort of drinking and rampage.
00:05:00Young women especially have a hell of a time with,
00:05:02with kind of sexually aggressive young men and and
00:05:05and all kinds of problems like this.
00:05:08Other people will say that this was the kind of the best time of their lives,
00:05:11that they had a certain freedom out in the steppe in
00:05:14Kazakhstan.
00:05:17So there is no single experience of the virgin lands.
00:05:19In terms of the kinds of concrete outputs,
00:05:23in terms of the amount of grain produced, again,
00:05:27the picture's pretty mixed.
00:05:29So the first couple of years, the results look really good.
00:05:31And Khrushchev is absolutely triumphant.
00:05:33He says, we've solved these problems.
00:05:36But then in nineteen fifty five, nineteen fifty six,
00:05:39the weather starts to become more unfavorable,
00:05:42and and results tail off quickly.
00:05:45And actually, as the years pass,
00:05:47there is no repeat of the first couple of really positive years.
00:05:49There is always extra grain produced by the sector land,
00:05:53but it's nowhere near as sort of, heroic,
00:05:56a turning point for the country as Khrushchev likes to think.
00:05:59There are also serious environmental consequences,
00:06:03especially through soil erosion in Kazakhstan.
00:06:06It ultimately creates dust bowl conditions,
00:06:09and this is problematic for decades going forward in
00:06:12Kazakhstan.
00:06:16Another element that you might recall on the positive side of
00:06:18things is that the virgin land scheme with the amount of
00:06:20people and especially young people brings a certain element
00:06:24of kind of new life and vibrancy to areas which were
00:06:27previously somewhat desolate.
00:06:30This is sort of former gulag territory mostly.
00:06:32And so the Virgin lands brings development.
00:06:35It brings cinemas and roads and housing and all this kind of
00:06:38stuff, kind of vibrant new student towns.
00:06:41But then again, as I said,
00:06:45this is sort of paid off against the environmental
00:06:46damage done by the process as well.
00:06:49The other major agricultural element to the Khrushchev is
00:06:52the corn campaign.
00:06:55Now this this is something which becomes especially well
00:06:57known, but I would suggest is not sort of critical to how we
00:07:00understand the Khrushchev era,
00:07:04except to say it's another one of these campaigns which tells
00:07:06us plenty about the way in which Khrushchev does things in
00:07:09the Soviet Union.
00:07:13He's very widely mocked for this kind of corn nut or maize
00:07:14nut, if you use the American term, is the sort of,
00:07:18standard accusation that that Khrushchev is obsessed with
00:07:22corn and maize and so on.
00:07:25The point of this is not really to get Soviet citizens eating
00:07:27corn on the cob all day long.
00:07:31The whole point of growing more corn or maize is,
00:07:32essentially for for fodder for animals.
00:07:36So this is a sort of a secondary stage in a process.
00:07:38Khrushchev says, if we can grow corn,
00:07:41then we can feed this to animals,
00:07:44and then we have more meat and milk and so on and so forth.
00:07:46It's also worth saying here when we think about Khrushchev,
00:07:49this is something this is an idea he gets from America.
00:07:53He thinks, he's told this is how farming
00:07:56is done in the USA,
00:07:59and their farming is so much more productive than ours,
00:08:01and he takes this idea.
00:08:03Now there's a really useful point there in that under
00:08:05Stalin, certainly late Stalinism,
00:08:09the Soviet Union much more insular.
00:08:11Any notion of taking sort of ideas like this from the US in
00:08:13particular would be frowned upon and probably dangerous.
00:08:16So this is, you know, a positive in in in Khrushchev's,
00:08:20account, we could say.
00:08:24However, this is something that that is also problematic
00:08:25in the sense that it's applied far too widely.
00:08:30Khrushchev says we must grow corn and we must grow it everywhere.
00:08:33And this includes places where it just does not grow properly.
00:08:36And so lots of Soviet farmers are basically obliged to try and grow crops,
00:08:40which they know will not grow in the far north and and so on.
00:08:45And as expected, the crops fail.
00:08:49So really, the kind of key takeaway from this is that it's an attempt at
00:08:52innovation, but it's really kind of blunt as an instrument,
00:08:57and it's kind of sloppily executed as well.
00:09:01So to conclude thinking about agriculture,
00:09:05I would say that the Stalinist system is largely left unchanged.
00:09:08There's tinkering at the edges.
00:09:12There's an attempt to make the system more productive,
00:09:13but the basic contours of how Soviet agriculture works do not
00:09:16change a great deal.
00:09:20Except to say this.
00:09:22When it approaches the mid nineteen sixties and there's,
00:09:24potential for another famine on the horizon following a
00:09:27drought, Khrushchev makes a very important decision.
00:09:30He decides to buy grain from the west,
00:09:34from Canada and and various other western countries.
00:09:36And for this, he is absolutely pilloried.
00:09:39He's relentlessly kind of mocked as being,
00:09:41a leader who made sure the Soviet Union couldn't even feed itself.
00:09:44However, the point is that there is no more famine.
00:09:48We can we can only hypothesize,
00:09:51but presumably during the Stalin years,
00:09:54this this drought and shortage of crops would probably have
00:09:56led to famine under Khrushchev.
00:10:00It's embarrassing to go begging to the west to buy grain,
00:10:02but people do not starve.
00:10:05
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Hornsby, R. (2024, June 05). Russia – The Rule of Nikita Khrushchev, 1953-64 - 1. Did the Virgin Lands Scheme change Soviet Agriculture? [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/russia-the-rule-of-nikita-khrushchev-1953-64
MLA style
Hornsby, R. "Russia – The Rule of Nikita Khrushchev, 1953-64 – 1. Did the Virgin Lands Scheme change Soviet Agriculture?." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 05 Jun 2024, https://massolit.io/courses/russia-the-rule-of-nikita-khrushchev-1953-64