WASHINGTON, Aug. 7 (UPI) -- As the Russian Federation and the United States continue their "son of the Great Game" tussle for the hydrocarbon riches of Central Asia, Washington has quietly and adroitly developed a program that will earn America more profound gratitude from locals than any number of bilateral military operations and lectures on human rights.

The U.S. Agency for International Development is reporting that, as part of a USAID project, representatives of Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik and Uzbek energy concerns met July 30 in Kazakhstan's largest city, Almaty, to discuss a regional model for electrical power transmission.

What is most interesting about the USAID assistance plan is that it is a tacit acknowledgment by Central Asian governments that one of the lingering legacies of the Soviet era, the promise of nationwide power generation, 81 years after the Bolshevik seizure of power in the Russian empire, remains unfulfilled.

Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, made power generation a keystone of his administration. In 1920 his government established the "Gosudarstvennaia komissiia po elektrifikatsii Rossii" ("State Commission for Electrification of Russia"), better known by its acronym GOELRO. Scheduled to last 10 to 15 years, GOELRO was intended to be the centerpiece of Russia's recovery from the ravages of the civil war that followed the revolution, and was the Soviet government's initial centrally planned project for socialist economic recovery and development, becoming the prototype for subsequent Soviet Five Year Plans. Lenin put the highest priority on the project, stating, "Kommunism -- eto est' Sovetskaia vlast' plius elektrifikatsiia vsei strany" ("Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country").

Central Asia's participation in the USAID project is a tacit admission that Lenin's great vision remains unfulfilled for many in Central Asia's agrarian communities, either by the Soviet Union or its successor, the Russian Federation.