Krasikovskaya Hydroelectric Power Station

Krasikovskaya Hydroelectric Power Station is a small hydroelectric plant on the Tok River near the village of Krasikovo in Krasnogvardeysky District, Orenburg Oblast, Russia, built by local collective farms in 1952-1953.

The decision to build it was made in 1952 at a joint meeting of three collective farms - the Karl Marx farm from the village of Podolsk, the Stalin farm from Staro-Yuldashevo and the Telman farm from Kuterlya - to supply electricity to the villages of Staro-Yuldashevo, Kuterlya, Krasikovo, Podolsk, Lugovsk and Ravnopol. To keep the river from interfering with the construction, a new channel was dug past Krasikovo and the Tok was redirected into it.

Construction began in 1953 under the direction of Fernand Edmindovich Penno and accountant Ivan Abramovich Koop. Square concrete foundations were dug out with S-80 tractors, ZIS-5 trucks and horses, as well as by hand: local volunteers, mostly young people, organized work days to dig the pits with shovels and fill the finished ones with cement. Machine halls for the turbines were built above the foundations: water was let through and shut off by gates on cables, fell onto blades below, and a generator turned that into electricity.