Q. Before candles, what did Czechs and Slovaks use for light?

A. Electricity.

		"POWER TRIP" DIRECTOR: Paul Devlin RATING: PG-13 in nature for socioeconomic issues

That bitter joke, making the rounds among East European refugees after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, is now applicable to the ex-Soviet Republic of Georgia and to "Power Trip," a documentary that might best be called, well, illuminating.

One of the communist system's precious few consumer virtues had been its subsidized (virtually free) electricity. But with the USSR's breakup came privatization, and in 1999 an American company named Applied Energy Services (AES) bought the rights to manage and distribute Georgia's electric power.

Thenceforth, it would be up to Piers Lewis -- AES's project director there, our hero here -- to keep the Georgians' lights on. That meant introducing radical changes in the industry and equally radical new concepts to the public -- such as the concept of paying.

Lewis, a capable, long-haired technocrat, discovered to his horror that only 10 percent of Georgia's electric customers (commercial and residential) paid their bills. A staggering 40 percent avoided payment by tapping into the company's main lines or their neighbors' or any other vulnerable part of the grid, doing so with homemade wires and configurations -- often with shocking results. Lewis set out to turn that around by means of another new concept (in Georgian experience): disconnection.

People are furious. It is senseless and outrageous to them. Yells one irate cut-off customer, "I'm stealing from the government, not YOU!"

The backdrop is Georgia's post-Soviet civil wars, massive unemployment, plummeting wages and Shevardnadze-induced political turmoil -- requiring all the time-honored graft-and-craft survival techniques a contemporary Georgian can muster.

"Power Trip" is also a profile of the idealistic Lewis and the cultural sensitivity of his company -- noble model in this Enron-Halliburton era. AES described its core values as "integrity, fairness, social responsibility and fun." The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, however, described those values as "risk factors" for investors. AES, suffering big losses, was forced to sell to -- big surprise -- the Russians, who now control most of Georgia's energy.

Bye-bye, communist domination.

Hello, capitalist equivalent.

"Power Trip" is short on thrills but makes a very technical subject accessible. Its bottom line reflects another rueful '68 joke adapted to '04:

"Under communism, Georgia was on the brink of an economic precipice, but under capitalism it has taken several steps forward."