With all that is going on right now, I was wondering whether this concern is new, or whether this happened before. Since at least in my perception the US and the Soviet Union were far more hostile during the Cold War than the US and Russia are now, I would guess it did but I don't know of any examples.
I am sorry if this question was asked before, I tried Google and the Reddit search function but couldn't find anything.
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The cold war political scene was quite a bit different than today. And the leaders of the ussr believed that communism was the future and that the Soviet Union would lead after world wide workers revolutions. Although Stalin was confident that capitalist nations like the US and UK would eventually go to war with each other, leading to natural revolutions in those countries, that did not occur. But it was natural, in their viewpoint, to help workers in all countries.
The USSR supported communist parties across the world, including those in Italy, France and the USA, with financial assistance. In exchange, these national communist parties took their ideological direction from Moscow. Allegedly, these parties even supplied assistance to the KGB throughout the cold war, and recruited for them.
In immediate post war Europe, the USSR and communism were very popular. Italian and French communists gained significant amount of votes in elections throughout the cold war. In the USA, the CPUSA also received Soviet subsidies, but never amounted to a real election threat. In later decades, as the euro communist movement took shape, Moscow was furious at what seemed like heresy from what it thought were controlled parties in Europe. The money though, kept flowing to assist these parties in getting elected.
And of course, in what the USSR considered it's sphere of influence, election interference was far less restrained. The 1945 Polish elections were far from free and fair, and any country that might shift to noncommunist government, like Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968, were harshly put down.