virgin land scheme

• causes:

  • collective farms were too ineffective to feed the whole country
  • importing food in large quantities during the Cold War was unacceptable to Khrushchev
  • being dependent on other countries was a major weakness
• the virgin land campaign encouraged young people particularly members of Komsomol (soviet youth organisation) to go to Siberia, Kazakhstan, the Volga region and the caucuses
• very little of the Soviet Union was suitable for growing crops such as Siberia and Kazakhstan which were completely unsuited
• Komsomol activists that travelled to work on farms or set up new ones learned that the government had done nothing to cater for them so there was no new accommodation causing massive overcrowding in small peasant villages
• some branches of soviet local government saw the scheme as an opportunity to get rid of orphans and abandoned children, alcoholics and criminals
• thousands of newly built tractors were diverted to the virgin land regions
• when tractors broke down there was insufficient parts to fix them