Sports in the Soviet Union

Today, we cover the impact of sports in the Soviet Union. Also, I am adding a tribute to one of the inspirations for this podcast, my daughter, Anastasya Schauss, who passed away on September 23, at the age of 27. If you'd like to support the podcast with a small monthly donation, click this link - https://www.buzzsprout.com/385372/support

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Episode 283 – Sports in the Soviet Union

Last time, we ended our two-part series on the eighteen conflicts Russia has been involved in since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, we embark on an entirely different topic: sports' role in the Soviet Union. 

This was probably the most challenging topic that I have attempted to create a podcast episode over the past thirteen-and-a-half years. Several books on the subject are available, but some are cost-prohibitive. When a used copy nears $300, I hesitate to take the plunge. Instead, I decided to see if there was enough information online to accomplish the task at hand. Happily, there is more than enough information to create a unique episode.

Before we get to Soviet sports, we need to learn a little about athletics in the old Russian Empire. Looking at participation in the Olympics is a way to view a country's involvement in sports. Restarted in 1896 in Athens, Greece, the Modern Olympics did not get Russian participation until the 1900 Summer Games, held in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Only four Russian athletes attended, with six attending the 1908 London Games. By 1912, at the games in Stockholm, 159 Russians came. This would be the last time that a Russian would appear at an Olympic Games for the next forty years.

When the Bolsheviks took control in 1917, they viewed sports as an example of a bourgeois program. They regarded the idea of competitive sports as a means of diverting the workers' focus away from class struggles and revolution. In the 1920s, they turned away from all international sports. The Bolsheviks also condemned the idea of competitive “medal chasing.” This was another sign of bourgeois decadence. 

From what I’ve gathered, Lenin saw absolutely no value in sports. Even though, when he was a teenager, it is said he was a sportsman, I could find little evidence of this. By the time he was seventeen, his brother Alexander was executed for a plot on the Tsar. Lenin became maniacally devoted to revolution and to his ideas related to Marxism. 

Socialists view sports as a capitalist means of extracting money from people. As Chris Barbery writes in his article Marxism and Sport, from the 1996 journal International Socialism, “Sport, despite the perception of participants and spectators, belongs to the realm of ‘unfree activity’. The rationality of capitalist production, based on commodity exchange, reduces all individuality to a minimum. It organizes and controls people not only in their work but in their leisure.”

As you can tell, the idea of sport, as it exists today, is incompatible with Marxist, Leninist, or socialist thought. This is why we see so little material about sports in the Soviet Union in the early days. Or is it? My opinion is that sport had to take a back seat as the hold of the Bolsheviks on the country was so tenuous that they didn’t need this kind of distraction. 

This would begin to change under the leadership of Stalin. He knew he could use sports and the people's interest in them to take their minds off the hardships they had to endure. Also, it turns out Stalin liked sports, especially football, or as the Americans call it, soccer. 

Starting in the mid-1920s, Soviet leadership began to promote sporting activities throughout the country, but more importantly, within the larger cities. As you would expect, it took on a collectivist bent. Clubs would form, with the largest being Spartak, which was founded in 1935 by industrial trade unions. The association boasted more than 120,000 recreational athletes two years after its creation. Later, the association united workers from every conceivable industry, and by the mid-1950s, its membership exceeded 450,000.

While in 1928, there were about 53,000 people involved in club sports, by 1935, the number had risen to over half a million. In order to create a club, you needed government approval and something to tie the club to. One, Dynamo, was attached to, of all things, the NKVD. CSKA, known as the Central Sports Club of the Army, was for soldiers; both still exist to this day.

Stadiums, pools, gyms, and other sporting venues began to pop up throughout the Soviet Union. In 1928, the largest stadium in the country at that time was built for Dynamo, with around 25,000 seats. The Air Force had its own club, and after the war, it was overseen by none other than Stalin's son Vasily. He actively developed the district's sports teams, including soccer, hockey, and basketball. If you’ve watched the comedy movie Death of Stalin, you would have encountered a scene where Vasily is yelling at the hockey team to pick things up. This is not surprising as there is a legend that during a soccer match between Yugoslavia and the USSR in 1952, Stalin phoned the dressing room, threatening that the Soviet team was not permitted to lose to the "Nazis from Tito's clique"! Fearing for their lives, they managed a draw.

While many citizens of the sixteen countries in the USSR participated in sports, quite a few suffered through Stalin's purges. One of the reasons was that participation in sports had to have a political side to it. Anyone seen as not being a pure communist would be thrown out of their prospective club and, during the Great Purge of 1937-38, executed or sent to the Gulag. 

After the end of World War II, and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a powerhouse, sports began to take an international turn. Stalin viewed this as a propaganda tool but only started using it with the 1952 Olympic Games held in Helsinki. The Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, and Thailand, made their debuts at these games. 

The Soviet Union would dominate the Olympic Games between 1952 and 1988. Some 30 years after its collapse, it is still in second place for the number of medals won behind the United States. During those years, at the Summer Olympics, the Soviet Union won 395 gold, 319 silver, and 296 bronze medals. At the Winter Olympics, they garnished 78 gold, 57 silver, and 59 bronze medals for a total of 1,204 medals. The next highest total for any team for the entirety of the Olympic Games from 1896 to 2022 is Great Britain, at a total of 950 medals. This goes to show the total domination of the USSR in the Olympic Games.

So how did they do so well? There are a number of reasons for their stellar performances. First, for most of the history of the Olympics, the athletes were supposed to be amateurs. Technically, the Soviet competitors were amateurs; they were, in fact, professionals. They would work for the sponsor of the clubs they worked out at. Many were soldiers of the Red Army. They did not need an outside job as many other participants from other non-communist nations did. 

Another major issue that continues to this day is the prevalence of doping of Soviet and Russian athletes. Russia has had more competitors stripped of their medals by far. Forty-Four athletes have lost their medals because of doping. That represents one-quarter of all cases, with the next highest being Ukraine with eleven. The former Soviet Union was a master at doping and evading detection. 

One of the more obvious places where doping was most prevalent was with women and hormones. I can remember my parents yelling at the television when they'd see these huge, muscular women from the Soviet team appear at events like the hammer throw or some other sport requiring great strength. We know about this issue due to the uncovering of information after the breakup of the USSR and from interviews with coaches and athletes of the day. 

While few Soviet athletes were ever caught, everyone knew doping was happening. As Thomas Hunt wrote in his book Drug Games: The International Olympic Committee and the Politics of Doping, citing a 1989 Australian study, "There is hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games, certainly not a gold medal winner, who is not on one sort of drug or another: usually several kinds. The Moscow Games might as well have been called the Chemists' Games." The Moscow Games were one that the United States and many Western nations boycotted due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. 

There is one other reason why the Soviet women were so incredibly dominant in the Olympic Games: the equality that the Soviet system gave them with respect to men. While inequality between men and women is an issue to present times, this was not the case in the Soviet Union. Men and women were given some of the same opportunities and training not offered to those in the rest of the world. It was part of the idea of an egalitarian society that was at the core of Soviet and communist ideology.

There were, of course, instances where men were given more benefits and better conditions than women in the USSR, but the difference with the West was dramatic. It wasn't until the 1980s and 90s that women had more opportunities given to them, while in the Soviet Union, they were way ahead in the early 1950s.

Another explanation for the great showing at the Olympics was a theory that the Soviets had regarding training. They were firm believers in the "triangle" theory, where the more people they trained and participated in sports, the larger the base of the pyramid. This meant that they could produce more top-level athletes to succeed in international competitions. 

Additionally, their training ideas were state-of-the-art. When I was a competitive athlete back in the late 1970s, my older brother, a world-class runner at one time, would send me material outlining Soviet and Eastern Bloc training methods to try out. Some seemed absolutely ludicrous, but others were eye-opening and helped me run some of my fastest races while a teenager and young adult. 

Switching gears for a bit, away from the Olympics, Soviet propaganda was something I intend to do an entire episode in the future. When it came to sports, the posters and tag lines were sometimes inspirational and sometimes kind of funny. Here is a collection that I found during my research: Be hardy, if you want to be healthy!, Eat diversely, regularly, and moderately. Getting fatter means getting older!, Sport is health, willpower, and bravery!, You may not be a champion, but you must be in good shape!, Railroad workers, become members of “Locomotive” club, and start playing sports!, and Sun, air, and water multiply energy for labor!, that last one uses a recurring theme of everything in Soviet society was focused on work and its benefits to communist life. 

Some additional ones include Collective farmer, be athletic!, The USSR is a mighty sports power!, Youth, go skiing!, We must set every world record!, We stand for mass sportsmanship in downhill skiing!, and with a child sitting on the lap of a Soviet male athlete, Do you want to be like me? Exercise!

For many years, the Soviet Union, as I mentioned earlier, would boycott competitions with the West until 1946, and many times afterward. They would join several international federations, including, in 1951, the International Olympic Committee. The first Soviet athlete to become a world champion in any sport was Grigory Novak, who, in 1946, won in weightlifting.

From the website Russia Beyond, I came across the following comment that I found somewhat amusing, "The USSR did more than boycott Western competitions. As part of the campaign “to combat submissiveness to the West,” the government introduced Russian versions of many sporting terms. For example, the names of many boxing punches were replaced: “uppercut” became udarom snizu (“strike from below”) and “hook” bokovoy udar (“side blow”); in wrestling, the French souplesse (suplex) was renamed brosok progibom (“deflection throw”).”

Not only did they change the language of some of the terms in sports, but they also changed whole sports to fit a nationalistic ideal. From the Russia Beyond website, "In addition, the USSR invented its own sports. In the 1930s, for example, the Eastern martial arts jujitsu and judo were banned, to be replaced by the "ideologically correct fighting form" sambo (self-defense without weapons). In the 1960s, this sport was even recognized globally and included in many competitions. 

The USSR also devised a game based on volleyball: it involved two teams divided by a net, but instead of volleying the ball, they were allowed to catch it. Because it was played by mostly young pioneers, it was called "pioneerball”.

The Soviet bureaucrats, as they were want to do, created what they called the All-Union Sports Classification System. This formed a five-tier system with the top being Merited Master of Sport, followed by Master of Sport, then Classes A, B, and C. The Masters of Sport not only had to achieve physically but they also were expected to serve as political and ideological examples and to pass on their experience to younger athletes.

As I mentioned earlier in the podcast, repression, especially during the time of the Great Purge, could hit the sports arena. Anyone who competed abroad could be considered compromised by the capitalist, bourgeois foreigners. Fellow competitors, jealous of elite athletes, were often reported to the NKVD as spies, Trotskyists, or other subversive anti-Soviet agitators.

It could become absolutely ridiculous during this period of paranoia. Going back to the website Russia Beyond, they write, “It reached the point of absurdity: for example, the ski club at the State University of Physical Culture, Sport, Youth and Tourism was declared a “terrorist organization” — the student members were arrested, and the leader was shot.”

High-jump record holder Nikolai Kovtun was arrested while working out because his parents had worked on the Harbin railroad, part of the Chinese Eastern Railway. As I mentioned in one of the episodes on the Gulag, railway workers, engineers, and superiors were targets. In the 1930s, a campaign was launched against former workers on this particular railway line and their families to "liquidate sabotage, espionage, and terrorist elements." Kovtun would spend ten years in the Gulag for being the son of the accused.

It gets even more absurd. The head of the Spartak sports association of trade unions, Nikolai Starostin, was also denounced and sent to the camps. It is rumored that the real reason behind Starostin’s imprisonment was his soccer team's victory in the 1939 USSR Cup. En route to picking up the trophy, Spartak defeated the previously-mentioned Dynamo and — even more dangerously — a club with the telling name “Stalinets”.

A major sport that began during the time of the Russian Empire that continued on throughout Soviet times to this very day is known as Bandy. It has been called Russian hockey, but it was likely to have been invented in Great Britain in the late 19th century. It is considered the national sport of Russia today. 

The Federation of International Bandy was founded in 1955 by the Soviet Union and three Nordic countries. Bandy is the only sport to enjoy the patronage of the Russian Orthodox Church. It is a ball sport played by two teams wearing ice skates on a large ice surface (either indoors or outdoors) while using sticks to direct a ball into the opposing team's goal. The rink is considerably larger than a standard hockey rink, closer to the size of a soccer pitch. It is kind of like a combination of ice hockey, soccer, and field hockey.

Along with Sweden, first the Soviet Union, then Russia has dominated the sport. Only once, in 2004, did another country win the international championship, and that was Finland. Today, about fifteen countries field bandy teams, although Russia and Sweden continue to dominate.

As for other winter sports, biathlon is considered one of the most popular. For many of the Olympic and International competitions, figure skating showed Soviet dominance, especially in pairs skating. 

When it came to the summer games, aside from track and field, boxing and fencing were extremely popular and saw a large number of medals awarded to Soviet athletes. Fencing was extremely popular among the Russian elite before the revolution. Within the Russian Orthodox community, when I grew up, both girls and boys would train and compete in the sport of fencing. 

In his article for Sports Illustrated in 1957, Sports in the USSR, Jerry Cooke wrote this about the subject, "Soviet’s go about playing sports with a “certain grimness” that makes it look as if they do not find much enjoyment in playing sports. Sports is so heavily integrated into society in many cases it is just another job. For example workers in factories are required to do exercises throughout the workday that are designed to increase their productivity.”

By the late 1980s, Soviet athletes were allowed to travel by themselves to foreign competitions. The era of having them escorted by members of the KGB was over. The Soviet Union was desperate for cash, and their athletes were primed to win competitions that paid them handsomely. These winnings were heavily taxed, leaving little for the average Soviet athlete.

Today, Russia has had its share of problems in the international community. It has had its athletes banned because of doping and in response to the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. 

Well, I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Join me next time when we discuss the historical relationship between Russia and Finland.

So, until next time, Dasvidania eh Spasiba za Vinyamineya.