Communism is Soviet Power

This Ukrainian Soviet poster from the 1920s-1930s proclaims Lenin's famous slogan: "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country," announced on November 21, 1920, as the foundation for the GOELRO plan—the Soviet Union's first national economic recovery program. Lenin declared that industry could not develop without electrification, acknowledging this transformation would require more than a decade to accomplish. The poster promotes the ambitious campaign to bring electrical power throughout the USSR, including Ukraine, symbolizing technological progress and communist modernization that would supposedly liberate workers from backbreaking labor while powering industrialization.

The electrification campaign exemplified how the Bolsheviks sought to legitimate their rule through promises of material transformation rather than just revolutionary rhetoric. A 1925 poster by Shass-Kobelev presented the formula "Soviet Power + Electrification = Communism," reducing Marx's complex dialectical materialism to simple arithmetic that promised scientific planning could deliver prosperity. For Ukraine, electrification propaganda carried particular significance as the region's agricultural wealth and industrial potential made it critical to Soviet economic plans—though these same qualities would later make Ukraine a target for Stalin's forced collectivization and the Holodomor famine. The poster's bold constructivist design, featuring dynamic diagonal lines suggesting electrical transmission and industrial power, exemplifies how Soviet avant-garde artists placed their talents in service of state modernization campaigns, believing technological progress would vindicate the revolution's utopian promises even as political repression intensified.