This article is based on a travelogue witten by Clyde Ellis and published in the January 1960 issue of RE Magazine.

Rural electrification was an important national goal for Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union in the 1950s. But it was a very different kind of rural electrification than we had here in the U.S.

Giant state farms got power first; all they needed. But when a line was eventually extended from a one of them to the small, peasant-run collective farm down the muddy road, there were lights but hardly any appliances in the farmhouse. The average use of electricity for farm homes was 20 to 30 kilowatt-hours a month, no better than the first American co-ops recorded in 1935 and 1936.

NRECA General Manager Clyde Ellis observed these differences close up in the fall of 1959 on a 12,500-mile tour of the Soviet Union with 10 members of a special Senate committee investigating Soviet agriculture.

In 1952, 76 percent of state farms had power, while only 15 percent of collective farms had it. Six years later, collective farm electrification had more the tripled to 48 percent, but state farms also had big gains, to 96 percent.

To put that in perspective, virtually all U. S. farms and ranches, large and small, had been electrified by 1958. Only a few remote areas were without central station power, and the numbers of homes not served in each of these areas was measured in dozens.

“But there is far more to rural electrification than just extending lines to the farms and villages,” wrote Ellis. “There is a great difference between rural electrification in the Soviet Union and in the United States in the use of power once it is installed.

“Electricity without appliances and electrical equipment is no electicity at all.”

Ellis went on to say that a federal planning official he visited in Moscow told him that only 3.6 percent of collective farms had electric milking machines, while all of the state farms had them.

He noted that none of the “specialists” he and other members of the Senate delegation interviewed had data on the kinds or numbers of electrical appliances or equipment used on farms or in rural homes.

In Siberia, a chairman-manager of a collective, said, “We have some home refrigerators, all homes have radios, and there are 18 TV sets in the collective. We [also] have a dozen electric motors on this collective.”

“An American farm operation of comparable size would have hundreds of electric motors,” Ellis wrote.

Ellis, who was general manager of NRECA from 1943 to 1967, didn’t have many positive things to say about America’s Cold War nemesis. He did observe, however, that rural electric systems were cheaper to build in the Soviet Union, because peasant houses were situated close to the farm-to-market road. This meant that “once a power line is brought into a village, only short distribution lines are required to connect the homes and other buildings.”

Many of the villages where collective farmers live had not been electrified because, he wrote, “within the Soviet system, productive activities [farm operations] have a higher priority than electric light and power for homes. In America, of course, we never think of a farm being electrified unless the farm home is electrified.”

Because of this, nationwide usage was low. In 1958, 6.8 billion kilowatt-hours of electric energy were used in Soviet agriculture as compared to 24.7 billion kwh in the U.S.

The Soviet Union hoped to increase its usage by almost four-fold between 1958 and 1965 under its Seven Year Plan. The stated purpose was to increase agricultural output by 70 percent.

“Soviet rural electrification is … at about the same state of development, as far as power use is concerned, as was the United States in the mid-1930s,” Ellis wrote. But unlike the U.S. rural electrification, which was dependent on Congressional support, “there probably won’t be any government efforts to double the interest rates on electrification loans for farmers. Rural electrification loans are now made to collectives without interest.”