After Stalin died, Kazakhstan was transformed by the Virgin Lands opening
("mass phase" 1954-56). This was a far less predictable (than we thought) mixture of Khrushchev's reforms that brought
hundreds of thousands of new settlers, investments, political turmoil, ethnic strife, and eventually, prosperity and rehabilitation
to the many people of Kazakhstan.
My forthcoming book The
Virgin Lands Planet: Kazakhstan after Stalin breaks with the stereotypes of Brezhnev's Virgin Lands Cult. It
is an in-depth exploration of Khrushchev's first reform, the first monograph on the difficult first years in
the fields and streets of an unexpectedly crowded and political tselina, rocked by mass fights, pogroms, and labor action
and by the grass-roots political movements of the nations in exile. Because of the tselina, Kazakhstan became a unique home
to many people. The book tells of their experiences without the pathos of the Soviet era, and it tells the story of
many cultures who made the tselina their home who were invisible and unmentionable in Soviet times. Based on more than one hundred interviews and a wealth of party
and police records in briefly-opened regional and central archives, my book reveals the tselina as a complex social
reform that rehabilitated a vast region that had served as a prison complex and as a dumping ground for unwanted nations.
Read (use ILL or your library's remote
ordering system) my article in Russian: Pol', Mikaela, "'Planeta Sta Iazykov'. Etnicheskie otnosheniia i sovetskaia identichnost'
na tseline," in the Moscow journal Acta Eurasica/Vestnik Evrazii, No. 1 (24), 2004, pp. 5-33.
In English, the title is "The "Planet
of One Hundred Languages: Ethnic Relations and Soviet Identity in the Virgin Lands" (forthcoming).
In English, read "Women
and Girls in the Virgin Lands," in
Melanie Ilić, Susan E. Reid, and Lynne Attwood, Women in the Khrushchev Era (Basingstoke and New York, 2004),
pp. 52 -74.
