Cotton Growing in Crimea and Southern Ukraine (1940s–1950s)¶
An attempt by the Soviet leadership in the late 1940s and 1950s to launch mass cultivation of cotton in the arid southern regions of Ukraine and Northern Crimea as a strategically important raw material for the USSR defense industry.
Overview¶
After World War II, Soviet officials hoped to sharply increase domestic cotton production for the military industry ("the mighty Soviet army") at the expense of Southern Ukraine and Northern Crimea. In the late 1940s, a special Ministry of Cotton Growing was established in the Ukrainian SSR, and cotton was turned into a capricious "party-and-government crop," the cultivated area of which was forcibly introduced in nearly all southern and southwestern districts of the republic.
It was precisely by the necessity of growing cotton and supplying the Black Sea Fleet and resorts that the Soviet authorities propagandistically justified the expediency of large-scale irrigation construction — the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, Kakhovka Reservoir, South Ukrainian and North Crimean canals, as well as the flooding of Velykyi Luh and the Dnieper floodplains.
Key Details / Subtopics¶
- Military-strategic goals: Cotton was viewed as a key explosive and textile raw material for the Soviet army.
- Repressive status of a "party crop": For damaging or destroying even 10 cotton plants during soil cultivation, tractor drivers were sentenced to several years of imprisonment in camps and jails.
- Forced labor of the population: All rural population and schoolchildren were mobilized for cotton harvesting, working in the fields until severe frosts set in. Peasants dried cotton bolls on stoves throughout the winter.
- Connection to canal construction: Propaganda convinced the local population that flooding the floodplains and constructing the Kakhovka Reservoir and North Crimean Canal was a necessary sacrifice for the sake of cotton growing.
- Futility and phase-out: Despite mass coercive measures and enormous labor expenditures, the climatic conditions of Southern Ukraine and Crimea proved ill-suited for this heat- and moisture-loving crop, and the project failed.
Sources and Links¶
- Whose Shore, Whose Water — article by Petro Volvach in the newspaper Krymska Svitlytsia (2018, No. 5), primary source of information on cotton growing.
- The Price of Crimean Prosperity — article by Petro Volvach in the newspaper Krymska Svitlytsia (2018, No. 3) on the price of creating the Kakhovka Reservoir.
- North Crimean Canal — hydrotechnical system whose construction was justified by the needs of cotton growing.
- Kakhovka Reservoir and Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant — main source of water for irrigation canals.
- Flooding of Velykyi Luh — Cossack floodplains flooded for the construction of the reservoir.
- Construction Stages of the North Crimean Canal — stages of the implementation of the irrigation project.
- Petro Volvach — Crimean scientist and journalist, researcher of the history of canal construction.