In the first year of the programme, 19 million hectares were ploughed up, and in 1955, an extra 14 million were ploughed. With all this new land, a vast amount of people would need to be brought in from all over the Soviet Union: the Komsomol was charged with recruiting them.
More than 300,000 people, mostly Ukrainian, arrived in the Virgin Lands to begin new lives as farmers. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, students and combine harvester operators would join them; however, these people would stay for only a year's harvest. By the end of the mass immigrations to the Virgin Lands, Ukrainians outnumbered Kazakhs in many areas.
For a brief time, Khrushchev inspired a communist zeal in the peoples of the Soviet Union, and concentrated that zeal on a task that, for an equally brief time, produced the expected results.
The first harvest on the Virgin Lands, in 1956, was a stunning success. Of the 125 million tonnes of grain produced in the Soviet Union that year, more than half of it came from one eighth of the country. The Soviet Union was producing, per capita, twice as much wheat as the West. However, harvests would never again reach the level of 1956, for a number of reasons, most of them because of Khrushchev's lack of foresight.
, a romanticised view of the Campaign]]