Tabula Rasa Electrified, a project by photographer Gianluca Pardelli, documents the several trips he made through these vast swathes of land: the post-Soviet 'stans, Mongolia and the republics of Tuva, Altai, Kalmykia, Buryatia and Khakassia in Southern Siberia. The project takes its name from Vladimir Lenin's quote "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” For Lenin, electricity was central to the communist project. To quite literally place these isolated communities on the grid would, as Lenin put it, “raise the level of culture in the countryside and to overcome, even in the most remote corners of land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease, and barbarism.” The reality, of course, was not quite so simple, and the tremors of these Soviet electrical currents can still be felt to to this day.