‘A Shop Window Where You Can Choose the Goods You Like’.

<italic>This article examines the Finnish industrial and trade fairs held in the Soviet Union in the context of Finnish-Soviet trade and scientific-technical cooperation in the 1950s and 1960s. While primarily focused on fairs, it</italic><italic>also discusses different activities that accompanied them, such as lectures, visits, and negotiations between Finnish traders and Soviet officials and specialists. This study illustrates how such first-hand contact played an important role in Finnish-Soviet communications. First, they helped Finnish producers showcase their goods and technologies directly to Soviet buyers in various ministries and organizations. Second, these contacts included diverse activities such as face-to-face contacts, lectures, and seminars, being a means of technology transfer from Finland to the USSR. Finally, although they were commercial interactions without explicit ideological purposes - like many international exhibitions of the last century - Finnish fairs demonstrated a technological gap between Finland and the USSR.</italic> [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]