GOELRO

Drafting

Work on the electrification plan began with a decision of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in February 1920 and was presented to the Eighth Congress of Soviets that December. Krzhizhanovsky led the commission and some two hundred scientists and engineers took part, many of them specialists who had worked on power and hydraulic projects since tsarist times. Producing a document that looked ten to fifteen years ahead while the civil war was still unfinished was itself an unusual undertaking.

The plan was not a list of power stations. It divided the country into eight economic regions and designed the siting of stations together with the placement of industry according to each region's resources and transport conditions. It set out new generating capacity, including thirty thermal stations alongside hydro projects, and arranged the corresponding expansion of metallurgy, machine building, and chemicals.

Execution

Execution started more slowly than the document assumed but gathered pace from the later 1920s. The Volkhov hydroelectric station and the Shterovka and Kashira thermal stations were early results, and the Dnieper hydroelectric station became the plan's emblem by its scale. In 1931 the Soviet authorities announced that its principal targets had been exceeded.

GOELRO left more than generating plant behind. The method of designing intersectoral links on the basis of regional resource surveys, the procedure of breaking long-range targets into annual plans, and the organizational form that attached a body of technical specialists to a state planning agency were all formed in this work and became the prototype of the Five-Year Plans.

Electrification as symbol

Lenin left the formula defining communism as Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. The phrase was quoted repeatedly in Soviet propaganda afterwards, and the expression Ilyich's bulb settled into idiom for the arrival of electricity in the village.

The symbolism has two layers. One presents technical modernization as the content of socialism. The other treats the grid as the material basis for integrating a dispersed peasant economy. The second connects to the later argument over collectivization, in the sense that electrification implied a reorganization of smallholding agriculture.