The Virgin Lands Campaign (, Osvoenie Tseliny; , Tyng Igeru) was Nikita Khrushchev’s 1953 plan to dramatically boost the Soviet Union’s agricultural production in order to alleviate the food shortages plaguing the Soviet populace. In September 1953, the Central Committee plenum – composed of Khrushchev, two aides, two Pravda editors, and one agricultural specialist – met to determine the severity of the agricultural crisis in the Soviet Union. Earlier in 1953, Georgy Malenkov received credit for introducing reforms to solve the agricultural problem in the country, including increasing the procurement prices the state paid for collective farm deliveries, reducing taxes, and encouraging individual peasant plots. Khrushchev, irritated that Malenkov had received credit for agricultural reform, introduced his own agricultural plan. Khrushchev’s plan both expanded the reforms that Malenkov began and proposed that 13 million hectares (130,000 km2) of previously uncultivated land be plowed and cultivated by 1956. This land was located on the right bank of the Volga, the northern Caucasus, Western Siberia, and Northern Kazakhstan. The Kazakhstan party leader at the time of Khrushchev’s announcement, Rakhmizhan Shayakhmetov, played down the potential yields of Virgin Lands in Kazakhstan. He did not want Kazakh land under Russian control. Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and other leading party members expressed opposition to the Virgin Lands Campaign. Many believed the plan was not economically or logistically feasible. Malenkov preferred initiatives to make the land already under cultivation more productive, but Khrushchev insisted that bringing huge amounts of new land under cultivation was the only way to get a major increase in crop yields in a short amount of time.