Virgin and Idle Lands project

…Soviet period by the government’s Virgin and Idle Lands Campaign of the mid-1950s—Tselinograd was Russian for “City of the Virgin Lands”—and by the city’s role as capital of a kray (region) that united the five northern provinces of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic in 1960–65. There was much new construction…

…as a result of the Virgin and Idle Lands project, initiated by the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, himself a Slav. This project drew thousands of Russians and Ukrainians into the rich agricultural lands of northern Kazakhstan. By 1989, however, Kazakhs slightly outnumbered Russians.

The Virgin and Idle Lands program launched in 1953 opened up the vast grasslands of northern Kazakhstan to wheat farming by Slavic settlers, a program that, over the course of several decades, led to an ecological disaster (see Aral Sea). Kazakhstan’s significance in the Soviet period…

…he vigorously implemented Khrushchev’s ambitious Virgin and Idle Lands Campaign in Kazakhstan. Brezhnev was soon promoted to first secretary of the Kazakhstan Communist Party (1955), and in 1956 he was reelected to his posts on the CPSU Central Committee and in the Politburo. A year later, after he had loyally…