Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fokin,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Tyumen State University, Tyumen, Russia, e‑mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
“Automatics don’t Suit Us”: Elections as an Element of the Confrontation Between Socialism and Capitalism in the Cold War Era
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2022-6-11
The turn of the 1950s and 1960s was marked by the desire to build a dialogue between the East and the West. The USSR was showing its openness and willingness to compete with the West not only with tanks, planes and missiles, but also on the symbolic field. One such aspect of the competition, which was supposed to prove the superiority of socialism, was the Soviet elections. Soviet propaganda actively emphasized that genuine democracy existed only in the USSR. In capitalist countries, various censors and other restrictions prevented the population from fully expressing its political will. During this period, the struggle for true democracy fitted well with the general achievements of the USSR in the exploration of the space and the atom, and successes in science and technology were supposed to support the advantages of the model of democracy which was being implemented within the Soviet regime. At the same time, it is important to note that the Soviet leadership sought not to hide the peculiarities of Soviet elections, such as almost 100 % turnout and no alternatives, but rather to show the progressive nature of the Soviet electoral system. The article analyzes a meeting in 1962 between representatives of the Central Election Commission of the USSR and students of courses for activists of the trade union movement in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It shows how the representatives of the Soviet system sought to demonstrate the advantage of the Soviet electoral system and the disadvantages of the Western one. In this way the discussion of Soviet diplomacy is considered in the context of the Cold War.
Publishing: 28/12/2022
The article has been received by the editor on 16/09/2022
How to cite: Fokin A.A. “Automatics don’t Suit Us”: Elections as an Element of the Confrontation Between Socialism and Capitalism in the Cold War Era // Historical Courier, 2022, No. 6 (26), pp. 146–153. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2022/ISTKURIER-2022-6-11.pdf]
The work was carried out with the financial support of RFBR grant No. 20-09-00218 “Practices of Interaction Between Government and Society in the Late Soviet Period (1956–1985)”.
Links: Issue 6 2022
Keywords: Elections; Democracy; Cold War