Spiritual nourishment: The virgin lands campaign and the emergence of the Soviet people

The Virgin Lands Campaign aimed to bring 50 million hectares of new land under cultivation in Siberia, the North Caucasus, and (primarily) Qazaqstan. The campaign is widely understood to have been initiated by Nikita Khrushchev in 1953 both as a way of addressing food and material shortages in the Soviet Union and as part of his consolidation of power after Stalin’s death; it is also often interpreted as a failure because harvests began to stagnate in the virgin lands in the mid-1960s. This thesis argues that an important motivation for the scope of this campaign was Khrushchev’s interest in transforming Soviet society, particularly by improving material and spiritual wealth and by encouraging the emergence of the Soviet people. Migration, cultural initiatives, and the presence of a permanently settled community in the virgin lands all contributed to the Russification of the territory, and propaganda narratives promoted these cultural shifts as signs of the rise of the Soviet people. The virgin lands, which were proposed to become the Soviet Union’s sixteenth union republic, and which would have been the first union republic to lack a titular nationality, epitomized the denationalization of territory. These sociocultural shifts in the virgin lands, and the social shifts that the campaign facilitated in the rest of the Soviet Union, demonstrate that the campaign was a crucial element of post-war Soviet society.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Russian, E Eur, Eurasian St

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Kelly, Sonia

Contributors dc:contributor

• Whittington, Anna
• Randolph, John

• Virgin Lands Campaign
• Soviet people
• Kazakhstan
• Nikita Khrushchev
• Soviet Union

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Sonia Kelly

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129303

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129303