Virgin Lands campaign

The Virgin Lands campaign (Russian: Освое́ние целины́, romanized: Osvoyeniye tseliny, lit. 'reclamation of tselina'; Kazakh: Тың игеру, [təŋ ɪjɡeɾʏw]) was Nikita Khrushchev's 1953 plan to dramatically boost the Soviet Union's agricultural production in order to alleviate the food shortages plaguing the Soviet populace.

Hundreds of thousands of young volunteers settled and farmed areas of Western Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan. While the scheme was initially successful, it eventually became a tremendous disaster for Soviet agriculture.^[1]