The Virgin Meadows campaign defines the second largest Soviet environmental disaster after Chernobyl

In the 1950s, Moscow sought to achieve its food security by exploiting the virgin northern Kazakh meadows to grow wheat. Millions of hectares were drained and turned into barren deserts, disrupting the natural order, in the second largest Soviet environmental disaster after Chernobyl.

Fears are growing that Russia will extend its influence over northern Kazakhstan, after deploying its forces there at the request of the Kazakh authorities, to help end the widespread state of lawlessness that the country has known since early January.

The US State Department warned against the repetition of the Donbass and Crimea scenario for Ukrainians in the Kazakh regions, which have a Slavic majority, after opinion polls about the tendency of the population of its regions towards Moscow and the spread of separatist tendencies among a large segment of its members.

On the other hand, going back to history, we find that Soviet Russia committed one of the most horrific environmental disasters against the region, which was known at the time as the "Virgin Meadows Campaign" in northern Kazakhstan, through which it drained millions of virgin hectares in a failed project to grow grain, turning it into desert areas. barren, pushing its natural system to collapse.

Virgin Promoter Campaign

Under the resonant socialist slogan "the land is for those who work on it", Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev launched in 1953 his campaign to exploit the Kazakh "virgin meadows", under the pretext of ensuring food security for the Red Empire, which has long lived under the threat of starvation since its founding in 1917.

A campaign directed not to support the Kazakh peasantry, but to achieve it, 300,000 Russian volunteers of the Komosmol organization (Leninist Youth) were mobilized to cultivate 27 million hectares of virgin lands. It also encountered strong opposition, most notably from the head of the Kazakh Communist Party at the time, and from prominent figures in the ruling party in Moscow, stressing that neglected agricultural lands are more important than cultivating new lands, and that the project has not been sufficiently studied.

According to Soviet statistics, the campaign was a success in its first three years. From 1954 to 1958, it yielded about 48.5 billion rubles of crops in exchange for 30 million rubles of investments. And production evolved from 150.6 thousand tons to 609,000 tons of crops. However, this did not last long, as production decreased and the return declined, ending the campaign in a fiasco.

Horrific environmental disaster

The decline in crops that occurred is due to the agricultural exhaustion that occurred to the land, as it was greedily drained, in return for the destruction of the fertile layer of soil that was swept away by the wind after uprooting the natural vegetation that ensured its stability.

Thus, those meadows, which until recently were green and abound with various natural plant species, have turned into a barren desert swept by the dry currents from the desert of Mongolia.

The damage also affected the water beds in the region. According to a study by the Ural Environmental Science Forum, "the solid areas of the dark-colored plowed soil became very hot, causing chronic manifestations of drought, which dried up the plains area, its rivers and lakes."

The study added that "the intensive use of mechanization and the hunting practiced by volunteers working on those lands, in addition to eliminating the local vegetation cover, wiped out a number of animal species that lived in the area." On the other hand, "during that era, not even a single nature reserve was established to preserve these natural species," which gives a picture of the comprehensive depletion led by the Soviet Union there, in an environmental disaster that is the second in terms of damage after Chernobyl.