Event

Virgin Lands campaign

1954–1960s · 20th century

The Virgin Lands campaign was a Soviet programme launched by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 to ease grain shortages by ploughing up unused steppe, mainly in northern Kazakhstan and western Siberia. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers, many of them Russians and Ukrainians, settled on new state farms. Harvests rose at first but fell with drought and soil erosion in the early 1960s.

Virgin Lands campaign
Image: Post of the Soviet Union, designer G. Komlev / Почта СССР, художник Г. Комлев · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Mentioned in 1 state history

Kazakh SSR

See also

Cite this entry
APA
The Epoch Institute. (2026). Virgin Lands campaign. In The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/virgin-lands-campaign
MLA
“Virgin Lands campaign.” The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia, The Epoch Institute, 2026, https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/virgin-lands-campaign. Accessed .
Chicago
The Epoch Institute. “Virgin Lands campaign.” The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. 2026. https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/virgin-lands-campaign.
Harvard
The Epoch Institute (2026) ‘Virgin Lands campaign’, The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. Available at: https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/virgin-lands-campaign (Accessed: ).

Last reviewed October 2026Random entry ↻