ABSTRACT
While the Western democracies at the start of the 1930s were struggling to overcome the Great Depression, the Soviet Union tried to use its own planned economy as a propaganda weapon against the ‘catastrophic economic situation’ in the bourgeois democracies. This was having some success in Western intellectual circles, where people joined the communist parties of their own countries and saw the Soviet Union as an example worth emulating. In several countries elections led to a strengthening of rightist parties but leftwing parties were also establishing ‘people’s front’ governments.
