Ukraine 450,000 ethnic Germans from Ukraine and more than 200,000 Crimean Tatars were victims of forced deportations. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev became the new leader of the USSR. Having served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukrainian SSR in 1938–49, Khrushchev was intimately familiar with the republic; after taking power union-wide, he began to emphasize "the friendship" between the Ukrainian and Russian nations. In 1954, the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereyaslav was widely celebrated. Crimea was transferred from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR. By 1950, the republic had fully surpassed
Nikita Khrushchev Khrushchev had risen to power. Since the 1940s, Khrushchev had advocated the cultivation of corn (maize) in the Soviet Union. He established a corn institute in Ukraine and ordered thousands of acres to be planted with corn in the Virgin Lands. In February 1955, Khrushchev gave a speech in which he advocated an Iowa-style corn belt in the Soviet Union, and a Soviet delegation visited the U.S. state that summer. While their intent was to visit only small farms, the delegation chief was approached by farmer and corn salesman Roswell Garst, who persuaded him to insist on visiting Garst's large