Three Sources on the Virgin Lands: A School Project in Kostanay
A group of pupils in Kostanay is preparing a project on the Virgin Lands campaign. The teacher supplies three items.
Source 1. An article in a republican newspaper, September 1956, headlined 'The steppe has become a granary': 'The virgin lands have justified the hopes placed in them. The harvest is unprecedented; the party's decision of 1954 has been crowned with success.'
Source 2. A 1989 memoir by a former state-farm agronomist in Kostanay oblast: 'In the first years we ploughed pasture that should never have been ploughed. The first harvests were good; then the dust came, and yields fell to half. We had no covered storage for a third of the grain, and it spoiled at the railway sidings.'
Source 3. Census figures: by 1959 Kazakhs were about 30% of the republic's population and Russians about 43%, whereas in the 1920s Kazakhs had been a clear majority.
The group must decide what the campaign actually achieved.
1. Source 1 and Source 2 give opposite impressions. Explain why both could be partly true, and identify the additional source that would let the group settle the question of whether the campaign raised average grain output durably.
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Both sources can be true because they describe different things at different moments.
Source 1 describes a single, exceptional year in a controlled newspaper. 1956 was the campaign's banner harvest, and the article's purpose was to celebrate a political decision, not to record an average. A state newspaper in 1956 had no incentive and little freedom to report soil damage or storage losses.
Source 2 describes a trajectory over years, written when criticism had become possible. The memoir's author reports a pattern that is technically coherent: virgin soils give a strong first crop while the accumulated organic matter is still present, then decline when the same land is cropped repeatedly without enough fallow or fertiliser. Storage failure is a separate problem - it destroys grain after harvest without reducing the harvest figure at all.
So 'the 1956 harvest was huge' and 'yields fell within a decade and much grain was wasted' can both hold.
What would settle it: systematic harvest and procurement statistics (state statistical yearbooks, elevator and procurement records) showing grain output and sown area for the same districts over 1954–1965. Only a consistent annual series, not a single harvest and not a single memoir, can show whether output held up. Memoirs and newspapers then become explanations of the numbers, not substitutes for them.
2. Using Sources 2 and 3 together, explain the chain of causation linking the campaign's methods to the change in the republic's ethnic composition.
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The link is not a single step but a chain that must be stated in order.
- Policy decision: in 1954 the leadership ordered the ploughing of huge areas of northern Kazakhstan, a sparsely populated region of pasture and fallow land.
- Labour demand: this scale of ploughing, sowing and harvesting could not be met by the local rural population, so organisers recruited and mobilised settlers, including specialists, machine operators and demobilised soldiers, mostly from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, plus organised Komsomol volunteers.
- Settlement: new state farms, workers' settlements and a rebuilt administrative centre were created, with housing, schools and services for the incoming population. Migration became permanent, not seasonal.
- Demographic consequence: the arriving population grew faster than the local one, and the Kazakh rural economy that the ploughing displaced - pasture-based livestock herding - could support fewer people in the same area.
- Result visible in Source 3: by 1959 Kazakhs were about 30% of the republic and Russians about 43%, a reversal of the earlier position where Kazakhs were a clear majority.
A strong answer also notes that the campaign was one factor among several - earlier collectivisation and the famine of the early 1930s, wartime evacuation and industrialisation had already shifted the balance. The virgin lands campaign accelerated and completed a trend rather than starting it from zero.
3. A classmate writes: 'The campaign was a failure, because in 1963 the USSR began buying grain abroad.' Assess this conclusion.
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It contains a real fact inside a flawed argument.
The fact: large-scale Soviet grain imports did begin in 1963, which is a genuine signal that the country's grain system was under strain.
The flaws:
- Single cause. The 1963 imports followed a severe drought in the main grain regions, combined with procurement and pricing policies that gave farms little reason to economise. The imports cannot be attributed to the virgin lands alone.
- Wrong unit of analysis. Imports are a national indicator; the campaign was a regional programme. Northern Kazakhstan did become a large and lasting grain producer. A programme can raise output in its region and still fail to make the whole country self-sufficient.
- No defined criterion of 'failure'. Failure measured by short-term output? By output sustained over 20 years? By soil conservation? By the welfare of the people settled there? By cost per tonne? Each criterion gives a different verdict, and the classmate has not chosen one.
Better formulation: the campaign met its short-term goal of rapidly expanding sown area and grain output and made Kazakhstan a grain-growing region, but it did so at high cost - wind and water erosion on marginal land, declining yields without heavy fertiliser inputs, losses from inadequate storage, the contraction of pasture livestock farming, and a demographic shift that reduced Kazakhs to about 30% of the republic. Whether that trade-off counts as success depends on which criterion you declare in advance, and a good answer states the criterion before pronouncing the verdict.