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Electrification.
100 Years of the GOELRO Plan
Museum of Moscow
2021
2021
The GOELRO Plan, approved in 1921, was not just a historic milestone that shaped social, economic, and industrial processes—it also became one of the defining symbols of its era. For artists, poets, filmmakers, and designers, it served as a metaphor for revolution. Lenin’s formula, "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country," opened vast opportunities for visualizing ideas that had previously existed only in political speeches. Everything associated with revolution—education, industrial progress, energy—could now be represented through powerful and vivid imagery: light, rays, power lines, and the iconic Ilyich’s Lightbulbs.
From the early stages of planning, the GOELRO Commission (State Commission for the Electrification of Russia) placed great importance on the ideological and symbolic aspects of the project. It was crucial to visually and vividly link electrification to the new era, even though the commission itself was composed largely of pre-revolutionary specialists (including R. Klasson, G. Krzhizhanovsky, V. Kirpichnikov, I. Radchenko, A. Schwalbach, V. Starkov, and others). Moreover, the foundational projects for GOELRO had been developed in the 1900s-1910s and discussed at Electrical Engineering Congresses before the revolution.
As electricity reached homes and barracks, connected distant settlements with wires, and made the internal colonization of the USSR visible, it came to symbolize technological progress and social equality, the speed and scale of revolutionary change. Electricity became the hero of stories, plays, children’s fairy tales, posters, films, and appeared in graphic art, painting, and sculpture. It was personified through images of lightbulbs, electric glows, distant power lines, powerful turbines, and heroic electricians. It also became closely associated with Lenin, reinforcing the myth of the leader as the bearer of energy, light, and a new world.
Each artistic movement within the avant-garde found inspiration in the GOELRO theme. The new possibilities of electricity encouraged experiments in interdisciplinary art, including the creation of light-music, electro-theater, electro-architecture, electronic and illuminated musical instruments, and new forms of painting based on dynamics, luminosity, and contrast. For many artists, electricity took on an almost mystical, even sacred significance.
However, by the early 1930s, the implementation of GOELRO took on a darker dimension. Massive construction projects required hundreds of thousands of forced laborers. The OGPU-NKVD took over the management of power plant construction, infrastructure, and power line installation, relying on prison labor. At the same time, the repressive machine targeted GOELRO engineers: many of those who had developed and led the electrification efforts were arrested and executed. In 1937, thousands of engineers, power plant directors, cable network managers, dispatchers, energy specialists, builders, and technicians were repressed as "Trotskyists," "Japanese" and "German spies"—and were executed alongside artists, poets, filmmakers, and architects.
Thus, the builders of utopia and its visualizers, its poets and dreamers, shared the same mass graves.
About the Exhibition
The exhibition Electrification presented all facets of the electricity theme in the 1920s—from documents tracing the GOELRO plan and its key figures to the works of the Electroorganism art group; from architectural projects of power stations to the writings of Andrei Platonov and Ilya Selvinsky.
The exhibition was structured around an electric network, connecting major themes with clusters of individual stories and figures, all intertwined in a dynamic system.
From the early stages of planning, the GOELRO Commission (State Commission for the Electrification of Russia) placed great importance on the ideological and symbolic aspects of the project. It was crucial to visually and vividly link electrification to the new era, even though the commission itself was composed largely of pre-revolutionary specialists (including R. Klasson, G. Krzhizhanovsky, V. Kirpichnikov, I. Radchenko, A. Schwalbach, V. Starkov, and others). Moreover, the foundational projects for GOELRO had been developed in the 1900s-1910s and discussed at Electrical Engineering Congresses before the revolution.
As electricity reached homes and barracks, connected distant settlements with wires, and made the internal colonization of the USSR visible, it came to symbolize technological progress and social equality, the speed and scale of revolutionary change. Electricity became the hero of stories, plays, children’s fairy tales, posters, films, and appeared in graphic art, painting, and sculpture. It was personified through images of lightbulbs, electric glows, distant power lines, powerful turbines, and heroic electricians. It also became closely associated with Lenin, reinforcing the myth of the leader as the bearer of energy, light, and a new world.
Each artistic movement within the avant-garde found inspiration in the GOELRO theme. The new possibilities of electricity encouraged experiments in interdisciplinary art, including the creation of light-music, electro-theater, electro-architecture, electronic and illuminated musical instruments, and new forms of painting based on dynamics, luminosity, and contrast. For many artists, electricity took on an almost mystical, even sacred significance.
However, by the early 1930s, the implementation of GOELRO took on a darker dimension. Massive construction projects required hundreds of thousands of forced laborers. The OGPU-NKVD took over the management of power plant construction, infrastructure, and power line installation, relying on prison labor. At the same time, the repressive machine targeted GOELRO engineers: many of those who had developed and led the electrification efforts were arrested and executed. In 1937, thousands of engineers, power plant directors, cable network managers, dispatchers, energy specialists, builders, and technicians were repressed as "Trotskyists," "Japanese" and "German spies"—and were executed alongside artists, poets, filmmakers, and architects.
Thus, the builders of utopia and its visualizers, its poets and dreamers, shared the same mass graves.
About the Exhibition
The exhibition Electrification presented all facets of the electricity theme in the 1920s—from documents tracing the GOELRO plan and its key figures to the works of the Electroorganism art group; from architectural projects of power stations to the writings of Andrei Platonov and Ilya Selvinsky.
The exhibition was structured around an electric network, connecting major themes with clusters of individual stories and figures, all intertwined in a dynamic system.
Curators
Aleksandra Selivanova
Ekaterina Telеgina
Assistant Curator
Ksenia Guseva
Scientific Consultant
Yulia Shulenina
Exhibition Architecture
Dina Karaman
Graphic Design
Anastasia Yarullina
Anna Skrzhinskaya
Lighting Design
Alyona Osina
Photography
Ivan Erofeev
Aleksandra Selivanova
Ekaterina Telеgina
Assistant Curator
Ksenia Guseva
Scientific Consultant
Yulia Shulenina
Exhibition Architecture
Dina Karaman
Graphic Design
Anastasia Yarullina
Anna Skrzhinskaya
Lighting Design
Alyona Osina
Photography
Ivan Erofeev
This publication continues the research initiated by the curators of the exhibition Electrification: 100 Years of the GOELRO Plan and features scholarly essays on electrified cities and human bodies, the architecture of early Soviet power plants, the mythology of light in Soviet painting, the ideological foundations of the GOELRO plan, and how theatre, children’s literature, and design were inspired by the electrification project.
The book is illustrated with artworks, photographs, documents, and artifacts related to the history of electrification — including materials that were not presented in the exhibition.
The book is illustrated with artworks, photographs, documents, and artifacts related to the history of electrification — including materials that were not presented in the exhibition.
Moscow
392 pp
2021
392 pp
2021
Electrification: Light and Current in the Art and Culture of the 1920s–1930s
Aleksandra Selivanova, Ksenia Guseva (authors, editors)
