The Power of Light and Electric Shock: How Soviet Children Unravelled the Electric Plot Line

The article traces the tropes of electricity — hydroelectric plants, powerlines, transmission towers, electricians and lightbulbs — in early Soviet illustrated childrens’ books. It shows how the books counterintuitively synthesize fairy-tale elements and productivist themes while teaching Soviet children about the science, technology and ideology of electricity. The article thus argues that these early Soviet picturebooks use electricity in profoundly subversive ways. By drawing on the fairy-tale model, these books perpetuated Russian modernist associations of pre-revolutionary electricity with irrationality and magic, foregrounded the subversive ambiguity of electricity as an enlightening and dangerous energy and transmitted essentially modernist modes of synaesthetic reading to define Soviet modernity.