Forgive me if I seem overly pedantic in this reply, but you seem to know quite a bit, so I would like to extract as much information as possible.

Have you been to meetings with management? I used to work at a government-run place in Belarus. The meetings were precisely as what I described them.

Did you go to a government run place when the soviet union existed? I mean, it seems strange to me that you specify “government-run” for a workplace that existed during the soviet times. And even if you were there, I imagine that the late soviet union worked differently from the early soviet union. I cannot say if this applies to the meetings themselves.

Those who are in favor of accepting this proposal, please raise your hands… Please lower them. Who’s against it? No. Who abstains? No. The proposal is accepted.

That doesn’t sound any different from what one would say for voting as it is done in other situations. Who votes, who is against, who abstains is common. Do the “no” parts mean that no-one abstained in Russian? Because in English it doesn’t make sense. Did you mean to wrote “no one abstained”?

1rst convocation

Part of this maybe that during these years, the soviet government was heavily focused on war aims. 1937 incidentally is the year when the soviet government switched to focusing on preparing for war. Another part of it maybe the small sample size (maybe you just looked at the wrong section). And another part maybe that the stwnographix reports aren’t capturing all of the discussions. From whay I know about the us government, most of the discussion for policies happens outside the official convening times. Legislators negotiate with each other, they discuss bills in committees before even presenting them for a vote, etc.

Not all of these things I would expect from Molotov’s report itself - but I would be appalled if there was no other delegates to point at least one of the things I’ve outlined.

I can imagine nobody in the supereme soviet taking objection to such statements. They had relatively recently been subject to a brutal war of aggression from these states. Certainly their opinion of Britain and the United States would be very low enough that they would blame everything on them (especially since these were actively genocidal empires at the time). On the other hand, I believe attempts were made to form an alliance against Hitler previously, which the British and French rejected. It was also a widespread belief at the time that the treaty of versailles was responsible for the rise of Hitler. Certainly, the French could be blamed for their occupation of the rhineland and rural valley.