Eager to increase the grain production in the country, the Soviet government unveiled the Virgin and Idle Lands Project. Launched in March, it sent hundreds of thousands of volunteers to break open millions of hectares of virgin land in Kazakhstan and the south of Western Siberia. 13 million hectares were ploughed in the first year alone.
In June the Soviet Union commissioned its first nuclear power station at Obninsk near Moscow and in September detonated an A-bomb during a major exercise at the Totskoye testing range in the southern Urals.
Nuclear weapons were a very potent argument during the Cold War period and still, there was a brief thaw in East-West relations taking shape in the early 1950s. The new Soviet leadership, which took the helm after Stalin's death in 1953, was clearly out to show its desire to infuse a new vigor into the long-stalled relations between the wartime allies. The Soviet leaders made a series of visits abroad to establish personal contacts with the foreign leaders. Nikita Khrushchev's first such visit was to China where he pledged more economic assistance in the construction of plants and factories and the return to China of the naval base of Port Arthur.
In another sign of its good intentions, the Soviet Union attended a foreign ministerial conference which the United States, Britain and France were holding in Geneva in 1954 to discuss a broad international agenda including Indochina, Korea, the German problem and collective security in Europe. Because the Western powers were so busily advertising NATO's defensive nature, the Soviet government raised eyebrows hinting it might also want to join the North Atlantic Alliance. Simultaneously, it proposed signing a collective security pact in Europe with US participation. Both these proposals were rejected by the West on the grounds that the Soviet Union was not a democratic state.
In 1954 the German physicist Max Born received the Nobel Prize for physics for his statistical studies on wave functions. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, he took refuge in Britain where he enjoyed virtually unlimited freedom of scientific experimentation. Another Nobel Prizewinner of the year was the great American author Ernest Hemingway whose centennial birthday was celebrated last year all around the world. Hemingway's books are now experiencing a second wind and are extremely popular in the United States. A memorial exhibition was held in Florida tributing the man who was lovingly called Papa by his fellow countrymen…
1954 is the birth year of the outstanding American tennis player Chris Evert. She has posted a very impressive 21 Grand Slam wins since she won her first Wimbledon when she was 20. Chris Ever is the first female tennis player to take away 1 million dollars in prize money.
Chris' great fellow American, Elvis Presley, was only 19 when she was born but he was already on his way to stardom. In 1954 he recorded his first songs at the Sun Records studios in Memphis. Presley, also known as The King, owes his fame to a singing manner that was all his own, offering a stirring mix of southern blues, gospels and country music. 20 years after his death, Elvis' records are still selling in the millions of copies all around the world.
In 1954 the word bid farewell to two great Frenchmen. One was August Lumiere, the elder of the Lumiere brothers, who died after 92 years filled with outstanding achievements, wealth and fame. And with a good reason too because August and Louis-Jean Lumiere introduced the human race to the wonderful world of cinema. The other irreplaceable loss was the great artist, sculptor and draughtsman Henri Matisse. One of the early-20th century's most innovative painters, he preferred daringly bright colors which underscored the festive beauty of the surrounding world. His latest works are a complete exercise in abstraction, just like his colorful paper collages or the decoration of the Chapel of the Rosary for the Dominican nuns not far from Nice. At the time Matisse was over eighty .

THE 20th CENTURY:YEAR AFTER YEAR series of historical programs is prepared by Vladimir Zhamkin.


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