located primarily in Khazakstan and Siberia, areas of limited rainfall. Khrushchev’s objective had been to reclaim 28 to 30 million hectares of virgin land and wasteland. The estimated area of virgin and fallow land developed from 1954 to 1956 was 36 million hectares. Prior to institution of the virgin lands program, the sown area of grain in the USSR was approximately 100 million hectares; in 1954 it was 102 million. By 1956 the grain area had increased to 128 million hectares, while the wheat area had increased from 48 million hectares in 1953 to 62 million hectares in 1956, and maize sown for grain from 3.5 to 9.3 million hectares. Thus he achieved his objective of increasing the total cropped area and increasing both wheat- and maize-sown areas.
Not all of the increase in grain area came from plowing up virgin and wasteland. Aradius Kahan concluded that 10 million hectares of the increased sown area could be attributed to the reduction of the area of fallowed land-land that was in cultivation but cropped only every other year. In areas of limited rainfall, land is often fallowed as a way of accumulating moisture and nitrogen from one year to the next, which both increases and stabilizes yields. The practice of fallow is to leave land idle for a year, but cultivate it to prevent the growth of weeds that would utilitize the available moisture. The accumulation of moisture and nitrogen through fallow will increase the yields by 50 or more percent, and, with the saving of seed, the increase in net yield is even greater. In this light, more than a quarter of the reported increase in sown area represented a fraud: The land was neither virgin nor waste.
Was the virgin lands program successful by Khrushchev’s criteria, namely, increasing the output of wheat and other grains as the corn area expanded? It appears so. In part this was due to good luck-the weather in the virgin land area in the late 1950s was quite favorable. The national yield of grain per hectare, as estimated by the government, was actually higher from 1955 to 1959 than from 1950 to 1954, even though the virgin land area normally had a somewhat lower yield than the national average. One positive feature of the virgin lands program was that annual yields in the area generally were negatively correlated with the yields in the European area of the USSR. This meant that the year-to-year variations in yields tended to be offsetting to a significant degree, thus adding stability to the national average. The average of the official (and exaggerated) estimates of grain production from 1956 to 1960 was 121 million tons, or 41 percent more than in 1954. Not all of this increase was due to the virgin lands program, but much of it was.
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The corn program, however, was a dismal failure and was later largely abandoned. Corn requires a relatively long and warm growing season and much more moisture than wheat or most other grains. Most of the farm areas of the USSR were short on all three of these. Hardly any of the corn grown in new areas reached maturity-it had to be utilized as green feed or silage.
Overall grain production in the USSR more than doubled between the early 1950s and the late 1980s. Part of this increase was due to the virgin lands program, but most was due to increased yields from seed improvements and increased applications of fertilizer. However, with the demise of the USSR, grain production has fallen by about 40 percent, while fertilizer use declined by much more. See also: AGRICULTURE; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH
Kahan, Arcadius. (1991). Studies and Essays on the Soviet and East European Economies, Vol 1: Published Works on the Soviet Economy. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners. Laird, Roy D., ed. (1963). Soviet Agriculture and Peasant Affairs. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.
D. GALE JOHNSON
The term virtual economy has been used to describe conditions in Russia’s transition economy where privatized enterprises continued to engage in value-subtracting production because they maintained buyers from the Soviet era who were willing to purchase goods at prices that failed to accurately reflect production costs or market value. Relying on relational capital, contacts and connections with other managers and government officials developed in the Soviet economy, enterprise directors in Russia’s transition economy were able to acquire resources and goods without cash payments either prior to, or after, the acquisition. Since neither the privatization process nor their ongoing operations provided Russian manufacturing firms with funds to renovate their obsolete capital stock, enterprise managers faced few options for upgrading product quality or changing the firms’ production assortment in order to compete effectively in domestic and global markets. In effect, the term virtual econ1642 omy refers to the situation where Russian privatized firms continued to operate as they had in the Soviet economy despite the facade that profitability considerations and market forces governed their activities.
As Russia’s transition process progressed in the 1990s, purchases between manufacturing firms increasingly involved barter and other non-monetary transactions, reducing the cash available for firms to acquire materials or pay taxes. In a virtual economy, barter and other non-monetary transactions play an important role in sustaining ongoing operations which transfer value from productive activities to loss-making sectors of the economy. Reliance on barter transactions restricts the firms’ ability to restructure their operations in order to produce higher value- added output. See also: VALUE SUBTRACTION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ericson, Richard E, and Ickes, Barry. (2001). “A Model of Russia’s ‘Virtual Economy.’” Review of Economic Design 6(2):185-214. Gaddy, Clifford, and Ickes, Barry. (2002). Russia’s Virtual Economy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Krueger, Gary, and Linz, Susan J. (2002). “Virtual Reality: Barter and Restructuring in Russian Industry.” Problems of Post-Communism 49(5):1-13. Marin, Dalia. (2002). “Trust versus Illusion: What is Driving Demonetization in the Former Soviet Union.” Economics of Transition 10(1):173-200.
SUSAN J. LINZ VKLADNYE KNIGI See DONATION BOOKS.
(1053-1125), one of the ablest grand princes of Kiev and the progenitor of the Monomashichi of Vladimir in Volyn, Smolensk, and Suzdalia. Born Vladimir Vsevolodovich, he inherited his sobriquet “Monomakh” from his Greek mother, a relative of Emperor Constantine IX Monomachus.
In reporting his early career in his autobiographical “Instruction” to his sons, Monomakh writes how his father Vsevolod, a son of Yaroslav Vladimirovich the Wise, had him administer
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Pereyaslavl, Rostov, Smolensk, Turov, and Novgorod, and how he campaigned against Polotsk and the Czechs. In 1078, when Vsevolod became grand prince of Kiev, he transferred Monomakh from Smolensk to Chernigov, therewith depriving his nephews, Svyatoslav’s sons, of their patrimony. In 1093, when his father died, Monomakh declined the Kievans’ invitation to be their prince, evidently not wishing to violate the ladder system of succession allegedly introduced by Yaroslav the Wise. He deferred to his genealogically elder cousin Svy-atopolk Izyaslavich, with whom he formed an alliance against the Polovtsy. The latter attacked the cousins, inflicted a crushing defeat on them, and then intensified their raids on Rus.
In 1094 Oleg Svyatoslavich and the Polovtsy evicted Monomakh from Chernigov, forcing him to occupy his father’s patrimony of Pereyaslavl. Because Oleg refused to join him and Svyatopolk against the nomads, the two drove him out of Chernigov. After Oleg fled to Murom, where he killed Monomakh’s son Izyaslav, Monomakh wrote him an emotionally charged letter (the text of which survives) pleading that he be pacified. Oleg responded by pillaging Monomakh’s Suzdalian lands. In response, Monomakh’s son Mstislav of Novgorod marched against Oleg, defeated him, and forced him to attend a congress of princes in 1097 at Lyubech, where Oleg submitted to his cousins. Soon afterward, Svyatopolk broke the Lyubech agreement by having Vasilko Rostislavich of Tere-bovl blinded. Monomakh therefore joined his cousins, the Svyatoslavichi of Chernigov, against Svyatopolk, and the princes met at Uvetichi in 1100 to settle the dispute. After that, all the cousins, led by Monomakh, campaigned successfully against the Polovtsy in 1103, 1107, and in 1111, when they inflicted a crushing defeat on the nomads at the river Don.
