Buried in a sanitized 1948 CIA intelligence digest — a compilation of translated clippings from Yugoslav newspapers, gathered by American analysts trying to understand what Tito's cooperatives were actually doing — is a throwaway sentence about rural electrification that reads like a manifesto for a movement we're only now rediscovering.

Cooperatives in villages of the Leskovac district are introducing electric lighting. The villages of Mratane and Mir already have it, while Veliki Trnjani and Rodari have set up power plants. The cooperatives in Pecejevo and Dinarac have begun preparations for electrifying their villages.

Read that again. Villages — not utilities, not the state — set up power plants. In 1948, in a war-shattered corner of the Balkans, farming cooperatives were building their own generation infrastructure. The same report notes that "14 cooperative brickyards in the Osijek district made bricks for building cooperative houses" and that "the cooperative oil factory in Vela Luka processed 193 carloads of olive oil." An entire vertically-integrated village economy — bricks, oil, electricity — owned by the people who used it.

What the book was: Not a book at all, but a declassified CIA "Foreign Documents or Radio Broadcasts" report. American intelligence officers scanned Yugoslav newspapers like Politika, translated the relevant bits, and filed them for policymakers. What we have is essentially raw source material: what Yugoslav peasants were being told about themselves by their own press, preserved because Washington wanted to know.

Was it ahead of its time? Wildly so. The dominant 20th-century model that eventually crushed this vision was the giant centralized grid — massive coal plants, transmission lines fanning out, one utility monopoly per region. Village power plants seemed quaint, inefficient, obsolete. But look at 2026:

• Community microgrids are one of the fastest-growing segments of the energy market, driven by climate resilience and grid reliability failures.
• Energy cooperatives in Germany (the Energiegenossenschaften) now own a huge share of the country's renewable capacity — same legal structure the Yugoslavs used.
• Rural electric cooperatives in the US, born from the New Deal, still power roughly 56% of America's land area.

The Yugoslav model failed for political reasons — collectivization was coercive, the state absorbed the cooperatives, and the whole federation eventually dissolved in war. But the technical insight buried in that CIA report — that a village of a few hundred people can generate, distribute, and consume its own electricity without needing a national utility — was correct. We spent 70 years forgetting it, then rediscovered it as "distributed energy resources" and started charging consulting fees.

The peasants of Mratane and Mir figured it out with 1948 technology and no PowerPoint decks.