Virgin Land

Abstract

This chapter analyses the place of virgin soil (tselina) in the Russian cultural imagination, culminating in discourses and cultural artifacts surrounding Nikita Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign (1953–1964). Tselina was a symbolic construct, materialized by Soviet state agricultural, economic, and social policy. The chapter investigates these myths of tselina, and the process of transforming a “natural” resource like virgin soil into a symbolic, discursive, and political resource. It explains how virgin soil was imagined as both a natural resource and a symbolic resource, central to re-energizing the Soviet polity and restoring the Romantic connections between people and land that had once been expressed in the nineteenth-century discourse of Russian pochva. Ultimately, the chapter brings the cultural biography of Russian soil full circle by showing how the Virgin Lands campaign hollowed out the myths of the Russian settlement of the steppe, the conquest of nature, and the Soviet friendship of nations.