Politics of Ukraine compete fiercely for control over the central government and the position of the president. During 1992 a number of pro-Russian political organizations in Crimea advocated secession of Crimea and annexation to Russia. During USSR times Crimea was ceded from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 by First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev to mark the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereyaslav. In July 1992, the Crimean and Ukrainian parliaments determined that Crimea would remain under Ukrainian jurisdiction while retaining significant cultural and economic autonomy, thus creating the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. The Crimean peninsula—while under Ukraininan sovereignty, served as site for major
Nikita Khrushchev West, but faced with the alternative of widespread hunger, Khrushchev exhausted the nation's hard currency reserves and expended part of its gold stockpile in the purchase of grain and other foodstuffs. While visiting the United States in 1959, Khrushchev was greatly impressed by the agricultural education program at Iowa State University, and sought to imitate it in the Soviet Union. At the time, the main agricultural college in the USSR was in Moscow, and students did not do the manual labor of farming. Khrushchev proposed to move the programs to rural areas. He was unsuccessful, due to resistance from professors