The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature

On October 20, 1948, the Soviet government announced the world's first state-centered program to reverse human-induced climate change, a grandiose plan to construct 5.7 million hectares of forest in the Russian south. However, the plan collapsed upon Stalin's death in 1953 because of a fundamental contradiction at the plan's heart. At first, the Stalin Plan advanced a basically conservative vision of restoring the steppes to an imagined prehistoric state, but soon a group of radical scientists advancing untested silvicultural theories managed to take control. The resulting struggle between the old approach and the new brought about the plan's collapse.