Robert Edelman

The Russians Are Not Coming! The Soviet Withdrawal from the Games of the XXIII Olympiad

At the time, the Western press described the Soviet decision not to take part in the Los Angeles Olympic Games as revenge for the boycott of Moscow-1980. Even today, the ‘revenge thesis’ is still the default explanation for those who would cite the events of 1984. Since the collapse of the USSR, Soviet-era archives have opened, giving an inside look at their decision-making. An examination of the reports reveals that the Politburo voted to expend vast resources to preparing Soviet athletes for the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The best revenge among their politicians, athletes, coaches, officials and journalists was to smash the Americans on American soil. Along the way the Soviets signed contracts and negotiated conditions as if they intended to take part. Then two things changed: party leader Yuri Andropov, a proponent of participation, was replaced in February 1984 by the aging and ill Konstantin Chernemko, an Olympic sceptic; and Soviet pilots on September 1, 1983, shot down a Korean airliner that had strayed into Soviet airspace, killing 269 innocents. These events energised conservative opinion in the USA. Elements on the far right called for the Soviets to be banned from the Games. The leading group, the Ban the Soviet Coalition, later threatened Soviet athletes and announced they would try to get them to defect. This was a small group deemed unimportant by the Los Angeles Olympic Organising Committee and the White House. Yet, the Soviets somehow contrived to actually believe this small collection of right-wing politicians and businesspeople were a real threat. Ultimately, it was fear of this less than fearsome group and State Department resistance that led the Politburo to keep their athletes home.

The five hats of Nina Ponomareva: sport, shoplifting and the Cold War

Abstract The 1956 arrest in London of the Soviet Olympic discus champion, Nina Ponomareva, for shoplifting five hats worth one pound became a major international incident. Initially, both sides followed familiar Cold War scripts. The Soviets demanded the charges be dropped, but the British refused to do so. Ponomareva went into hiding at the Soviet embassy. The matter was front page news the world over. Six weeks passed before it was resolved. This minor confrontation demonstrated both the tenacity of Cold War rhetoric and the ultimate ability of the two sides to find compromise.

Physical Culture and Sport in Soviet Society: Propaganda, Acculturation and Transformation in 1920s and 1930s

Susan Grant has produced a prodigiously well-researched book of essays that focuses primarily on physical culture in the USSR during the period of its gestation (and to a much more limited extent on sport). As such, it provides a useful corrective to those accounts that see the eventual forms of the Soviet sport and physical culture structures assumed as somehow inevitable, all-powerful and driven by Marxist ideology. Grant clearly demonstrates that the so-called ‘Big Red Machine’ was born but less than fully formed at the height of Stalinism. Yet, she also succeeds, by her focus on developments in the 1920s, in showing the ways that result was bound to happen. Grant situates physical culture as a central part of the Soviet quest for a modernity in which the bodies of Soviet women and men were to be modified by education, propaganda and emulation. Everything from understanding the complexities of the mind–body relationship to the simple necessities of tooth brushing and underwear changing were part of this only partially successful campaign. While chapters on body culture, youth culture and physical culture itself all cover areas familiar to many readers, they are presented here with a degree of detail not previously seen in the less than voluminous literature on the subject. Chapters on women (The Quest for an Enlightened Female Citizen), peasants (The Pursuit of a Rural Civilized Citizen) and the visual (Visualizing the New Soviet Citizenry), however, certainly chart new ground. One could argue that too much attention is paid throughout this volume to how the system of physical culture was supposed to work, but that difficulty is handled well in a final chapter on the realities and failures that were as much a part of the 1930s as the dams and factories. Those looking for more detailed and specific discussions of sport, however, will find only little attention paid to this subject. One can assume Grant’s editors lobbied to include sport in the title, but it is, in fact, a bit of false advertising. On the subject of editors, one has to wonder if Routledge even bothered to supply them to Grant. The writing is cumbersome. Sentences and paragraphs go on forever, and parallel construction is almost entirely absent. This, regretfully, will limit the audiences who can benefit from what is a helpful contribution to our knowledge. I would be comfortable asking graduate students in courses on sport, modernity, the body, gender or popular culture to read parts of this book. I cannot imagine, however, asking undergraduates to struggle through such awkward prose.

Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism (review)

This first-rate and highly original collection of essays joins a growing literature on things recently existing socialism did poorly. Having said this, it is a great deal more fun to read about failure than success. The volume is a vibrant contribution to the history of consumption under a system that privileged production. The authors are all in the midst of pioneering research, and they bring that excitement to this study of leisure in places that operated according to an understanding of history which centered on labor. As the editors make clear in an introduction that is informed by the theory and comparative literature on tourism, the organizers of this activity struggled with contradictions that had not been dealt with by the pioneers of the socialist movement. There were no such imaginary volumes as “Marx in the Mountains”, “Lenin’s Secret Garden” or “Bukharin at the Beach” to guide those who ran the tourist trade. As is correctly noted here, modern tourism was a creation of the bourgeoisie. Under capitalism, its purposes were both utilitarian and entertaining. It was practiced in groups and by individuals. By contrast, the editors note:

The End of the Communist Revolution.

Perestroika I - Back to the Future Perestroika II - Death on the Operating Table Seeds of its Own Destruction Was Stalinism Communist? The Long Agony of the Russian Revolution The End of the Revolutionary Empire The End of the Communist Menace Is There Socialism After Communism?.