Publish Date: Dec. 20, 1937
Cover Story: Russia: Foreign News
How TIME Covered the News: Joseph Stalin, the mustachioed leader of the Soviet Union, loomed large two decades following the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviet premier, according to TIME, had already “driven and scolded” his people with brutal Five Year Plans that rapidly industrialized the Soviet state at the cost of countless lives; the magazine scoffed at a sham Soviet election staged under Stalin’s watch.
“If all these things did not quite measure up to the U. S. idea of a free democratic election, they were nonetheless quite a big enough dose for Russian minds and Russian methods to cope with. Getting ballots and pencils to the places where they were needed was a big job and there were occasional slips of the new electoral machinery as when, in Simferopol, one of the polling places designated was a house torn down some months ago; in Rostov-on-Don where a polling booth was placed inside a cinema so that it was necessary to buy a ticket to the show in order to vote.”