Technology and Culture

436 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE OGPU (the secret police) began investigations while frightened bu­ reaucrats at Soiuzstroi called meetings and promised to act on Witkin’s ideas. With the passage of weeks, however, this apparent action lapsed and Witkin’s ideas were again shelved. Witkin’s battles brought him into contact with officials from a large number of organizations, including the Commissariat of Heavy Industry, the Council of Labor and Defense, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (RKI), and several industrial trusts. Witkin may well be the only Westerner ever to have been engaged by the RKI and the OGPU as an industrial expert. In his spare time Witkin took it upon himself to calculate the total construction completed during the First Five-Year Plan. He con­ cluded that in no year did construction exceed that of prerevolution­ ary Russia in 1913/14, and he found that total construction for the entire Five-Year Plan was less than that in America for an average single year between 1923 and 1932. Witkin’s analysis of Soviet construction was the first of its kind, and it established the truth behind the propaganda of official inflated figures. In the end Witkin was defeated by the bureaucracy he fought so tirelessly. He left the Soviet Union in 1934 embittered by his experi­ ences and by the failure of his courtship of the Russian actress Emma Tseraskaia. No publisher would touch the memoirs he wrote after his return to the United States, and his manuscript was destroyed after his premature death in 1940. It is fortunate that a single photocopy found its way into the Hoover Institution Archives, where historian Michael Gelb discovered it fifty years later. In publishing the memoirs of Zara Witkin, Gelb has greatly enriched the literature concerning life, politics, and industry in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Robert McCutcheon Mr. McCutcheon is a specialist in spacecraft dynamics at Computer Sciences Corporation. He is also a historian of Soviet science with several publications devoted to Soviet astronomy in the 1930s. Power at Cost: Ontario Hydro and Rural Electrification, 1911 —1958. By Keith R. Fleming. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992. Pp· xiv + 326; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $39.95. Keith R. Fleming’s Power at Cost: Ontario Hydro and Rural Electrifi­ cation is a welcome addition to the literature on the history of North America’s first major public power entity, the Hydro Electric Power Commission of Ontario (HEPC, commonly known today as Ontario Hydro). Much has already been written by Canadian authors about the popular ground swell among municipal and business leaders in the older, more settled southern areas of the province that urged TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 437 provincial government leaders to pass public power legislation in 1906. A few American writers, particularly those who have probed the battle between public and private power interests raging in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s, have described, although often briefly, the origins and ideology of the HEPC. Only limited research has been done, however, on the HEPC’s policy-making process and activities following the death of Adam Beck, imperious chairman of the commission from its founding to his death in 1925. Power at Cost helps fill the gap in existing literature on how the publicly owned HEPC actually worked. Drawing on numerous pri­ mary sources located at Ontario Hydro and other Ontario public archives, Fleming describes, in twelve well-written chapters, the motives and methods employed by the HEPC to make significant inroads into Ontario domestic, commercial, industrial, and rural power markets during a fifty-year period. The author’s primary purpose is to show how public policies were made and implemented by the HEPC and the provincial government, between 1911 and 1958, to bring electricity to rural southern Ontario. By 1958, rural electri­ fication in a region extending from Lake Huron to the Saint Lawrence River was virtually completed. Such an accomplishment was significant, claims Fleming, because of the HEPC’s early commitment to rural electrification and the steady pace at which it occurred. Particularly between 1911 and 1945, “Ontario had no peer in Canada in the rural field and had little to learn from...