Virgin Lands campaign
Khrushchev ploughs up the Kazakh steppe for wheat
From 1954, on Khrushchev's orders, tens of millions of hectares of steppe and pasture in northern Kazakhstan, Siberia and Altai were ploughed, and hundreds of thousands of settlers arrived. Early harvests set records, but erosion and dust storms in the early 1960s ruined part of the land. By the 1959 census Kazakhs made up only about 30% of their republic's population.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 15 years earlier
- 1945 Founding of the United Nations — 9 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 7 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 6 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 5 years earlier
Europe
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 21 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 18 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 13 years earlier
- 1952 Great Smog of London — 2 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 1 year earlier
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 13 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 12 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 9 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 3 years later
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 7 years later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 6 years earlier
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 6 years earlier
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 1 year earlier
- 1958 14 July Revolution in Iraq — 4 years later
- 1960 Founding of OPEC — 6 years later
Africa
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 6 years earlier
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 2 years earlier
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 2 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 4 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 6 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash — 25 years earlier
- 1955 Salk polio vaccine declared safe — 1 year later
- 1959 Cuban Revolution — 5 years later
- 1969 Moon landing — 15 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 16 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 18 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 13 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 12 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — same year
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 5 years later
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 80)
- Albert Einstein (aged 75)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 73)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 65)
- Mao Zedong (aged 61)
- Georgy Zhukov (aged 58)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 36)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 25)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 24)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 20)