Word: kazakhstan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...last year to undertake a vast switch in Soviet agricultural effort: to grow wheat on some 100 million acres of marginal and semidesert land in Siberia. Tens of thousands of young party workers and more than half the country's agricultural-machinery production are being shipped out to Kazakhstan and Altai. But the life is not easy...
...Russia faces a severe shortage of grain. Drought and storms had heavily cut har vests in the Ukraine and the Volga region. The Kremlin's long-range remedy - Party Secretary Khrushchev's grandiose scheme for plowing up virgin land in Siberia and Kazakhstan - had not proved as painless as had been promised. Though an area greater than the total cultivated land of Great Britain had been plowed up, it had been done only by snatching technicians and tractors from West Russian farms, and when those ran out, by drafting men and women from their villages and factories. Then...
Staggering Goal. As facts about the venture in Kazakhstan seeped out of Russia, outside experts were struck by two things in particular: 1) the declared goal was staggering-to make over 32 million acres of land, and to plow, sow and harvest 18 to 20 million tons of grain there within only two years; 2) the Kremlin was willing to rob its established farmlands of machinery and its factories of manpower to exploit the virgin lands. Taking from other sectors of the economy to build the new enterprise brought to mind Russian Satirist Krylov's fable of Trishka...
...Nothing like That." The first fever of enthusiasm wore off in the inhospitable climate, makeshift poverty and poor housing of Kazakhstan. "We have tea, as much sugar as we want, but no place to buy a teapot," a pioneer told an Izvestia reporter. "Kerosene lamps are also a problem . . . and then, washing basins . . . pots to cook...
...mixture of discontent, of listless workers, of idle and broken machinery, of incoherent direction, demanded action in Moscow. One day last month Pravda's lead article criticized the slowness of the Kazakhstan sowing and warned that the authorities on the scene would not be allowed to hide behind poor weather as an alibi. Nikita Khrushchev himself found it necessary to rush east to meet with the Kazakh Communist Party and discuss "at length" the problems of the virgin lands...