By Horace Lu

In honor of the squeaky-clean elections that saw Confucius Peace Prize laureate Vladimir Putin win the Russian presidency in a landslide, we’d like to alert you to some steamy homoerotic Sino-Soviet Communist friendship posters from the 1950’s!

A refresher: After Communists took control of mainland China in 1949, Beijing adopted a pro-Soviet diplomacy in exchange for Soviet support, loans and technology, during which a lot of propaganda sprung out endorsing Sino-USSR friendship.

Many propaganda posters at that time, as this gallery illustrates, consisted of a Soviet man and a Chinese man hand-in-hand. There’s evidence that hand-holding amongst men of a certain socialist inclination still goes on in North Korea, and we’ll leave you to decide whether homo-socialism is a legitimate phenomenon.

Meanwhile, we found this tweet from Mark Mackinnon of the Globe & Mail to be a pretty pithy take on how Russian democracy compares to China’s:

As a Canadian, Russian elections were a joke. As one who lived in Russia 10 yrs ago, I see progress. As a resident of China, twas inspiring. — Mark MacKinnon/马凯 (@markmackinnon) March 4, 2012



