In 1920, British writer Herbert George Wells visited Soviet Russia and met with Vladimir Lenin. Wells believed that it was impossible to realise the Russian revolutionary’s plan, as he wrote in his book Russia in the Shadows:

For Lenin, who like a good orthodox Marxist denounces all "Utopians," has succumbed at last to a Utopia, the Utopia of the electricians. He is throwing all his weight into a scheme for the development of great power stations in Russia to serve whole provinces with light, with transport, and industrial power. Two experimental districts he said had already been electrified. Can one imagine a more courageous project in a vast flat land of forests and illiterate peasants, with no water power, with no technical skill available, and with trade and industry at the last gasp? Projects for such an electrification are in process of development in Holland and they have been discussed in England, and in those densely-populated and industrially highly-developed centres one can imagine them as successful, economical, and altogether beneficial. But their application to Russia is an altogether greater strain upon the constructive imagination. I cannot see anything of the sort happening in this dark crystal of Russia, but this little man at the Kremlin can; he sees the decaying railways replaced by a new electric transport, sees new roadways spreading throughout the land, sees a new and happier Communist industrialism arising again. While I talked to him he almost persuaded me to share his vision. — H. G. Wells[7]

"Interestingly, Herbert Well revisited the Soviet Union in 1934 and was really astonished with what he saw" - Yelena Kosheleva, Head of Mosenergo’s Museum Group, noted, when Mosenergo PLC had published a book called "GOELRO: 100 Years On", prior to the anniversary.[8]

For all his imaginative sci fi brain, he couldn’t envision how electrification of the Soviet Union was even possible.