"Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country"
About this Quote
The context matters. Post-1917 Russia was exhausted by war, famine, and breakdown; the Bolsheviks faced the problem every revolutionary regime faces after the barricades: legitimacy in peacetime. Electrification becomes a stand-in for competence, a promise that the state will deliver something more convincing than speeches. It also bundles coercion and uplift together. “Soviet power” carries the undertone of centralized control; electrification carries the romance of progress. Put them in a single equation and you get a future that feels inevitable, even if it’s enforced.
There’s rhetorical discipline here: “plus” is doing enormous work. It implies the political system is incomplete without technological transformation, and the technology is meaningless without the party’s authority directing it. The slogan also reorients the revolution away from global theory and toward national infrastructure, a pivot from Marxist scripture to managerial statecraft. Lenin is selling not just a new economy, but a new sensory world - brightness, speed, connection - and implying that anyone opposing Bolshevik rule is opposing modernity itself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|---|
| Source | Attributed to Vladimir I. Lenin; commonly quoted as "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country." Listed on the Vladimir Lenin entry at Wikiquote (aggregated secondary reference). |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Lenin, Vladimir. (2026, January 14). Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/communism-is-soviet-power-plus-the-16275/
Chicago Style
Lenin, Vladimir. "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country." FixQuotes. January 14, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/communism-is-soviet-power-plus-the-16275/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country." FixQuotes, 14 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/communism-is-soviet-power-plus-the-16275/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.










