What could be easier, what with all the brilliant intellectual minds that Stalin had gathered around him, not to mention Joe's extensive library of 20,000 books? Only, of course, on account of "Saboteurs and wreckers," it didn't quite work out as the planners had predicted.
The Five-Year Plan of 1928-32 was punctuated by the Soviet Famine of 1932-33.
Thirty years later, Mao Tse-tung, as we then knew him, tried to repeat Stalin's achievement with another Five-Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward of 1958-62.
There's no doubt that the Great Leap Forward made Stalin's Plan look like a walk in the park, with the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-61 causing 15-55 million deaths.
How do we teach the kiddies and the experts and the intellectuals that Five-Year Plans Never Work?
My goodness, Baldrick's Cunning Plans have certainly gone upscale since the good old days of Private Baldrick in the trenches of World War I. It may be that the Climate Five-Year Plan puts our ruling class out of business, with sky-high energy costs and rolling blackouts, but maybe not.
The Bolsheviks won a world war after their Five-Year Plan and Famine, and the Maoists are still in power in China.
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