This map recently caught my attention.
It appeared briefly in a YouTube video titled “Why the Soviet Union was obsessed with corn.” The video was about Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s desire to grow corn in “New Lands” in the Soviet Union and the Coon Rapids, Iowa farmer named Roswell Garst who wanted to sell the U.S.S.R. hybrid seed corn. The video showed Khrushchev’s visit to Garst’s farm in 1959 and gave some interesting history behind the event, and even touched on Lysenkoism, the pseudoscientific farming practices that denied the existence of genes, claimed that heredity can be changed by “educating” plants, and resulted in crop failures and famines.
A Google image search for the map surprisingly came up with nothing, but I finally tracked it down through a footnote in one paper. It led me to a CIA report titled “Observations on Agriculture in the Soviet Union,” where the map appeared at the very end. The report, dated 23 September 1955, was a first hand account of the tour as it was reported to the U.S. government. It was declassified 12 September 2000.
The map struck me because the area labeled “New Lands” were not new or “virgin.” They are at least somewhat familiar to anyone who has looked at the Germans from Russia Settlement Locations map. The area shown in green highlight on the CIA map spans from the Volga region, up to Samara, over to Ufa, Orenburg, way over to Omsk, going as far east as Novosibirsk in Russia and spanning between Aktobe what what appears to be the Karaganda region in Kazakhstan. The CIA report occasionally referred to the the lands as “idle,” probably meaning they appeared to have been farmed before.
Of course, the lands had been farmed before, some of them as early as 1764. The lands suitable for farming were even described in detail in a certain Manifesto of 1763. The Germans and Mennonites with generations of knowledge of farming in those areas (what grew, when to plant) had been deported in 1941 to other locations in Kazakhstan and Siberia and were not allowed back to their farms after the war.
Compare the CIA map with part of the larger Germans from Russia map showing the same area with known German settlements marked.
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Newspaper articles about both the American farmers’ delegation’s visit to the U.S.S.R. in 1955 as well as Khrushchev’s visit to the U.S. in 1959 are numerous, especially on Newspapers.com and a few on Chronicling America. The same newswire stories appeared in newspapers across the country. The story was no doubt also on the nightly news broadcast and on the radio, too. These events are well documented and studied by scholars.
But what is missing in them is the reaction from the Germans from Russia communities in the U.S. about these visits. The map was not declassified until 2000, so there was no image to point to and see the obvious. Did they make the connection between our deported relatives and friends and where exactly Khrushchev thought corn would grow?
Few German-language newspapers were still publishing in the late 1950s. However, Die Welt-Post und der Staats-Anzeiger (by then publishing as one newspaper out of Omaha, Nebraska) covered the 1959 event but not the 1955 story. And its coverage was not at all about the corn. It ran translations of American newswire stories similar to what was being published elsewhere along with critical opinion columns of Khrushchev before, during, and after the event with headlines that included
August 14, 1959 — “Unter vier Augen” (“In Private,” or literally “Under Four Eyes”)
September 25, 1959 — “Apparatschik Khrushchev” (“Apparatchik” is a full-time functionary of the Soviet Communist Party apparatus)
October 2, 1959 — “‘Nachruf’ für Khrushchev” (“‘Obituary’ for Khrushchev”)
Does anyone who grew up in a Germans from Russia household or community in the U.S. who was alive in the 1950s remember the event, or of their parents or grandparents talking about it? I imagine those who still had family in Russia who had been deported might have had thoughts about this. Or was this something they would stay silent about, or only speak in German so the children wouldn’t hear?
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Related Posts and Sources:
- “Why the Soviet Union was obsessed with corn,” YouTube.
- “Lysenkoism,” Wikipedia.
- “Observations on Agriculture in the Soviet Union,” CIA FOIA Reading Room. (archive)
- “Virgin Lands Campaign,” Wikipedia.
- The 1763 Manifesto of Catherine the Great (posted 22 July 2018)
- 1763 Manifesto Register of Available Land (posted 23 July 2025)
- First Colonies Established After the 1763 Manifesto (posted 22 July 2022)
- Library of Congress Chronicling America
- “Khrushchev Visits Iowa Cornfields,” UPI, 1959
- “Diplomatic Farmers: Iowans and the 1955 Agricultural Delegation to the Soviet Union,” Peggy Ann Brown, 2013.
- “American Corn in Russia: Lessons of the People-to-People Diplomacy and Capitalism,” Victoria I. Zhuravleva, 2017.
- 1937-38 Collective Farms & Agriculture Maps (posted 4 October 2022)
- 1955 USSR “New Lands” Map - image album from this post.