Hugh Lincoln Cooper and the First Detente

Abstract

unexpected and, even now, seem paradoxical. In the United States electrification progressed increasingly under public ownership, culminating after bitter controversy in the Tennessee Valley Authority, while in the USSR Lenin's program of electrification was promoted by American technique and American businessmen. At the time that Lenin announced his fateful aphorism in 1920 the American electric-power industry was far in advance of any other. Major power stations had been built on the Susquehanna and Mississippi Rivers; Wilson Dam, at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which was to become the world's largest hydroelectric power plant, was in its early stages of construction; and the stormy battle between the advocates of public and private domination of electric-power production was entering its critical period. In the Soviet Union, Lenin's initiative was to result in the realization of a project whose antecedents reach back to the time of Catherine the Great. The venture, which became known as Dnieprostroy (Dnieper Construction Project), was a hydroelectric station at the great bend of the Dnieper River just below the rapids, and it proved to be even more powerful than Wilson Dam. In accordance with Lenin's dictum, development of the electric-power resources of the Soviet Union became a major component of the ambitious Russian industrialization program; and, in the course of that DR. DORN is professor of the history of science and technology and chairman of the Humanities Department at Stevens Institute of Technology. The author wishes to thank Benjamin German for first directing his attention to Cooper's work in Russia and his colleague, Jack Felman, for his searching criticism of the article in draft. He is also grateful to Cooper's daughter, the late Elizabeth Hardin of Chester, New Jersey, and Cooper's grandson, Ralph Sheldon of Stamford, Connecticut, for granting access to family records.