The Electrification of Russia, 1880–1926

by Jonathan Coopersmith

The Electrification of Russia, 1880–1926 is the first full account of the widespread adoption of electricity in Russia, from the beginning in the 1880s to its early years as a state technology under Soviet rule. Jonathan Coopersmith has mined the archives for both the tsarist and the Soviet periods to examine a crucial element in the modernization of Russia. Coopersmith shows how the Communist Party forged an alliance with engineers to harness the socially transformative power of this science-based enterprise. A centralized plan of electrification triumphed, to the benefit of the Communist Party and the detriment of local governments and the electrical engineers. Coopersmith’s narrative of how this came to be elucidates the deep-seated and chronic conflict between the utopianism of Soviet ideology and the reality of Soviet politics and economics.

Genres: History, Russia

174 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1992

About the author

A historian of technology, Jonathan Coopersmith, is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University.

Reviews

[Rohit]

A decent read about the power grid of the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union. There were a lot of interesting tidbits about the region's electrical engineering community, debates about the best way to go about electrification, and the various economic and social challenges. The book gets often lost in technical minutiae, however, and I wanted a lot more info and analysis about how electrification was thought of and planned via the Soviet leadership's communist/Marxist ideology, and how electrical engineers experienced revolutionary Russia.

[Susan Molloy]

Interesting.

💥 Recommended.
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