ABSTRACT
Anyone wishing to understand Russian and Soviet sport soon runs into two intractable problems: the paucity of information in any language, including Russian, and the tendentious attempt to glorify or denigrate the subject matter in much of the writing. The same applies to China. In the West, articles and monographs have often focused on coercive facets of the ‘Big Red Sports Machine’. This is the case with the American author Henry Morton whose pioneering study, Soviet Sport (Morton 1963), offered the first extensive sociological analysis of sport as an integral aspect of Soviet ideology. Published at the height of the Cold War, Morton’s book reinforced the already popularly held Western myth of the Soviet sports machine. An example of how difficult it was to publish a serious study of Soviet sport may be gauged from my own experience: during the US-led campaign to boycott the Moscow 1980 Olympic Games, the British government under Margaret Thatcher slapped a ‘D-Notice’ on my book Soviet Sport: Background to the Olympics (Riordan 1980), in an attempt to prevent newspapers and magazines printing reviews of the book – which the government obviously thought too pro-Soviet. On the other side, Soviet historiography laboured under the Stalinist censorship of the
‘dark spots’ in Soviet sport, such as the security service sponsorship and financing of the dominant Dinamo Sports Club (also imposed on all other countries that came within Soviet political orbit), political interference, ethnic tension at sports events, the purges of top sports officials, the state preparation and dispensing of performance-enhancing drugs, etc. Ironically, in an interview with the then Sports Minister, Sergei Pavlov, in 1980, I was shown my own book on the history of Soviet sport, Sport in Soviet Society (Riordan 1977), translated into Russian, but for ‘a restricted readership’. There was no other source for Soviet people to learn about Soviet sport and its roots in pre-revolutionary Russian society. Surprisingly, the Russian people are not much better served today. Although
Communism passed away at the end of 1991, no substantial book on Russian and Soviet sports history has been published in Russia. Instead, propagandist and sensationalist texts continue to appear, often written by the same sports bureaucrats who dominated sports history in Soviet times. See, for example, Vladimir Rodichenko, Olimpiyskaya ideya dlya Rossii [The Olympic Idea for Russia] (Rodichenko 1998). The author is Vice-President of the Russian Olympic Committee and, in Soviet times, was Deputy Sports Minister. At the same time, the new capitalist market contains a number of biographies of sports personalities (including of the football star, Eduard Streltsov, contentiously sentenced for rape in the late 1950s) and sensationalist exposures of the sinister side of Soviet sporting
activities, such as Mikhail Prozumenshchikov’s book, Bolshoi sport i bolshaya politika [Big-Time Sport and Big-Time Politics] (Prozumenshchikov 2004). An impassable barrier for most Western students of sport is language. Very few
Western sports scholars speak Russian (most speak only their native language). Western historians who do speak foreign languages have tended to regard sport as a non-serious area of research (as my old university professor used to say, ‘Sports research is something to do in your spare time, like wine-making’!). Happily, times are changing. Those sports historians who have devoted their research to Russian sport, working inside Russian society and in the archives, have discovered a rich heritage that, importantly, provides unique contributions to wider historical debates. For example, the American Robert Edelman has written of the novel role played by mass
spectator sport in a totalitarian society, thereby exposing the issues and debates surrounding the politics of popular culture. In his ground-breaking book, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR (Edelman 1993), he concentrates on the Soviet public’s consumption of sporting spectacles, what Soviet people chose to watch, not what the government tried to promote. In a more recent book, Mike O’Mahony, Sport in the USSR: Physical Culture – Visual Culture (Mahony 2006), examined Soviet sport as represented in the visual arts (mainly painting and sculpture), looking at the complex relationship between sport as an officially approved social practice and as a subject for cultural production. This emphasis on sport with these media highlights a significant departure fromWestern conventional practices. The major thrust of my own research has been sociological and political, emphasizing
the importance of sport for nation-building in modernizing societies. As I write in my preface to Soviet Sport: Background to the Olympics:
Western commercialised sports on the one hand and the gentlemanly dictum “sport for sport’s sake” on the other are often looked upon as entirely unsuitable (in modernising societies). Sport in… the Soviet Union is a serious business, with serious functions to perform: it is associated with health, hygiene, defence, patriotism, integration, productivity, international recognition, even nation-building. The Soviet experience of sports development may have more relevance to cultural revolutions in the emergent nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America than does our own.
