Attentive readers of the news boiling out of Crimea and Ukraine may have noticed this historical tidbit, that Crimea was transferred to Ukraine from Russia in 1954. See here and here for backgrounders.
Back when the Soviet Union was still around, I used to enjoy "eavesdropping" on the Kremlin by browsing the publication The Current Digest Of The Soviet Press. Snippets of old issues are available in Google Books, and while spelunking therein I found this announcement from 1954:
It's just a snippet, but you can grasp the high-handed optimism so typical of communist propaganda. Little did they realize that their "reforging" of humanity would fail, and the consequences of their social engineering would ripple out for decades.