"The following is a complete, unedited, unverified interview, portions of which were utilized in the Red Files PBS broadcast. Statements therein are the sole opinion of the interviewee, and do not reflect the views of PBS, DDE or Series and Web Site producer Abamedia, which are not Responsible for the interview content."

Interview with Robert Edelman

Interviewer: What was the significance of this series?

Edelman: In nineteen forty-five the British invited the Soviets to send a team in honor of the good shared victory in World War II. This was in November, just after the victory in Europe in May, and it was with a kind of incredible moment for Soviets. They really didn't know exactly what to do. It would be a leap into the great unknown. And the reason it was a leap into the great unknown is that they had been isolated diplomatically before the war and part of that was all isolated in the International Councils of Sport. They were not members of the International Olympic Committee. They didn't take part in the Olympics. They were not members of the International Soccer body, FIFA. So, before World War II, the only people they were able to play, their national team, on a regular basis –they only got to play against Turkey on a regular basis. They'd managed to play some Czech professionals in thirty-four and thirty-five. Players from the Spanish league were touring Europe to raise funds for the Royal Society for Spanish Civil War and they came to the Soviet Union. They played a series of six games and lost a total of one. And that was probably the strongest team any Soviet team had ever played up to this point in time. So here the Soviets game was suddenly taken from the homeland of football right then. This is the place they've always admired, they've always written about as a place that they want to emulate, and they're getting to go there. And the question that we still don't get the answer to is, surely this must have been discussed at the very highest levels of the party, and surely at this point there could have been no guarantee of victory. They won in nineteen forty-eight. When the Cold War really sets in, Stalin would begin the practice of calling in the Sports Ministers and demanding a guarantee of victory before any team could be sent out. After World War II, that probably wasn't the case, but surely it's hard to imagine that there must have not been plenty of trepidation, plenty of uncertainty. And interestingly enough, they were kind of covering their bets because, at the same time they sent Dynamo to England in nineteen forty-five, they sent the Central Army Team from Moscow to Yugoslavia. They sent the team from the auto industry to Bulgaria, and a team from Georgia went to Rumania. So I'm assuming that had they lost all the games in England, they could have said, well we won all these games in Eastern Europe so that at least compensates for it.

Interviewer: But they go to England and they don't lose all the games. In fact, they do incredibly well. What's the reaction back home?

Edelman: The players, also, and the coaches, didn't know what they were going to get. One of things that's quite interesting is, if you look at the build up for this series of games in the Soviet press, it's very muted. The first sign, or announcement even, that the Soviets are going to be sending a team to England in nineteen forty-five comes out in the papers maybe a couple of weeks before they're going. So there really isn't a chance to sort of develop an idea of what's going to happen and what the possibilities are, but there's tremendous excitement, I mean uncertainty about what is going to take place, and from fans especially. And it's interesting that they choose to broadcast these games back to the Soviet Union. They'd only started broadcasting games in the nineteen thirties, and the first of the great Soviet sports ministers did the reporting. So, clearly, there's some level of confidence that they must have had that they could send these things back live, and when they did come, and victory started rolling in, the reply or the response was really more a sensation and, all of a sudden, this tremendous pride that, we're doing something that's as good as the best in the world do. And the reaction then would be also a tremendous boost of excitement for Soviet fans in subsequent years. It was, we're going to these games and we're seeing soccer that is as good as any in the rest of the world. So that was of tremendous importance to any average Soviet citizen. And another thing that's important about, it in terms of Soviet life, especially popular culture after, nineteen forty-five, is that soccer was the one aspect of life that wasn't really politically controlled and was able to escape. Well especially after forty-eight, with some very, very severe repression on a cultural level, and also a sever xenophobia of pulling away from international influence. And movies, music, theater all recovered very slowly after the war, whereas soccer people just went back to the stadiums. They hadn't been destroyed and, to this day, people refer to it, one, as the golden age of soccer, and they also talk about soccer being our only spectacle, the one thing that gave everybody a degree of happiness. And it's the victories of Dynamo that give people the sort of sense of joy and optimism about what they're able to accomplish.

Interviewer: Just briefly, one of the key players on that team was Bobrov. Let's introduce him. Who was he? Big athlete?

Edelman: When the Dynamo team left Moscow for London on two DC3's, one of the players of, that was on that plane, who was Bobrov. Bobrov was easily the greatest Soviet athlete of all time, the greatest soccer player and ice hockey player of his generation. And he would subsequently go on to have an amazing career and win world championships in all sports. The main thing about Bobrov that was not known in England at the time, but everybody knew in the Soviet Union, was that Bobrov was not a member of Dynamo. He was a member of a central army team. They had always stacked their team with ringers from other teams when they sent out teams to travel abroad. And it's quite interesting, I think, that nobody in England knew this, whereas any Soviet sports fan would know because he had been the leading scorer in the first post war season, which began in May forty-five right after the victory, ended in November--the tour takes place in November. Bobrov was the leading scorer as I said. Everybody knows who he is, everybody knows who he plays for and yet nobody in England has any awareness of this. I couldn't get myself to be Bo Jackson, Bobrov.

Interviewer: No, no it's okay. That's fine.

Edelman: Before this was ABC, they made a show about this. It's something assuming you couldn't see anything and the lights were so blinding I had to have--thing up here and they were asking me questions, I don't know who's asking and so this is a lot easier. And it was live. Other than that it was not problem.

Interviewer: Maybe one thing I want to add might be fun would be to talk about the press coverage. I mean, the stories saying they're going to Britain are about one column inch. By the time they're playing Arsenal and beating Arsenal they're taking up a whole page.

Edelman: Do you want to talk about that the golden age of Soviet soccer or did we do that?

Interviewer: So in the late forties there's the question in the Soviet Union as to whether or not to join the International Olympic movement. What's the conflict there? What's the problem with the debate of the Communist state joining the Olympic movement?

Edelman: When the Russian revolution occurs in nineteen seventeen the International Olympic Committee is dominated by Lloyds and a variety of aristocrats and the whole idea behind Olympic amateurs and it's based upon excluding the working class because if you can't make a living doing the sports, you've got to do something else. Therefore it was seen as anti-proletarian by this proletarian revolution. At the same time the International Olympic Committee wanted no part of them, ironically enough. The whole idea of the Olympic movement and its commitment to the sort of dynamic of sport--and sport is something that's socially improving and also has a potential in terms of military capability--that was very attractive to the Soviets. And so while they liked the idea of a multisport competition like the Olympics, they didn't want any part of the International Olympic Committee at that point because they were also diplomatic, and isolated in general. So the question of becoming part of that International Olympic Committee was a highly charged political question from them about their relationship with the outside world. After nineteen forty-five they participated in the victory against the Nazis and against Fascism they are welcomed into the councils of the world, the UN and therefore the next step is to also become part of these various international governing bodies of sport and they begin to join the various federations and go from the forty-five to forty-eight period. There's a lot of uncertainty about whether they should take part in forty-eight on this question on whether they think they're gonna succeed or not, whether they think they're ready. Now that's sports apparatus, that big multi sports gymnastics, tracks, swimming, all that sort of stuff that would eventually emerge in nineteen fifty-two when they chose to take part in Helsinki, had really been established in the late twenties and was developing in early thirties. They'd had some successes, like the Dynamo success in soccer, they'd begun to send track teams to European championships and done well as well. So they were beginning to have some confidence in their capacity to do well. The general explanation is that Stalin wanted a guarantee of success in forty-eight, the Ministers of Sport felt they couldn't give that and so the Soviets generally sent observers. There was also a lot of uncertainty on the Olympic Committee's side about whether or not to let these people in, because even then they knew that these were not in fact true amateurs. They were being subsidized by the State and if they were called sport instructors or students, they were students of shot putting or they were instructors of swimming. And while obviously there were differences in the way they lived from professional athletes in the West, they clearly had a big advantage over the West's amateur athletes. So on those questions, a lot of this sort of worked out and we don't really know all the internals, especially at the highest level, in the party debates about whether they should take part or not. But by fifties, they had accepted the invitation. They took part in Helsinki, did brilliantly, came in a very, very close second, or, if you read their accounts first, or at least tied for first. And, the rest as we say is only one of domination both in the winter and summer programs for a long period of time. In some sense really right up to even after the collapse of the Soviet Union (remember the Soviet Union collapses in ninety-one) they send the United team who was called in ninety-two and that team did well as well.

Interviewer: That's great.

Edelman: There are people going through the archives on these very games as we speak.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Edelman: Ask me an easy one.

Interviewer: So okay. In the late forties and mid forties after the Dynamo success, suddenly they started playing hockey in the Soviet Union instead of bandy. Why would they start playing hockey? Was it part of this? You know a concerted effort to focus on the team, maybe a game that was played over abroad, what was the reason for starting playing hockey?

Edelman: We need more than a minute for this.

Interviewer: Just start.

Edelman: Okay. Let's do the bandy then. Before World War II the predominant version of hockey was this game bandy which was essentially field hockey on ice. A game with curved sticks and a ball, eleven men, a field the size of a soccer field, very small boards to prevent the ball from going off, a lot of skating, a lot of passing, not much physical contact. Throughout this entire period though both the twenties and the thirties, the Soviets were well aware of the version of hockey that was played in Canada, they were very interested. They were sending teams abroad, not necessarily to play Western professionals but they sent teams to Scandinavia to play workers' clubs and things like this. When they were there and also when they went to Western Europe as well they saw Canadian style ice hockey games being played in Western Europe. The Olympic Games did a great deal to popularize Canadian style hockey in Europe and there were very successful leagues in the twenties and thirties in Western Europe, so the Soviets saw Canadian hockey during that period and decided that they would like to emulate it even then. It looked like they were going to have a season in forty-one.

Interviewer: Okay

Edelman: Yeah. I'll just say even before the war they didn't want to have it but nineteen forty-six is the first time they were able to have it.

Interviewer: Yeah, that's right, yeah.

Edelman: Okay.

Interviewer: So let's talk about why they started to play hockey and how they didn't want to play it for a long time and how it suddenly became very popular and by now they were playing very primitive rinks and all these sort of things.

Edelman: Even before the war they'd wanted to have a hockey season so when the war ended in nineteen forty-six they were able to do it. They began to read the rules and bring in people to do clinics to teach referees how to play. In nineteen forty-six they set up these very primitive rinks with short boards that didn't even have rounded corners; they didn't have helmets; they wore cycling helmets and boxing helmets. They stuffed newspapers inside their socks, their mothers made their jerseys for them. Ah, but they just, they'd been wanting to play this new version because they had already, even before the war, been excited about it and as they began to play, some of these disadvantages they had were really turned to advantages. And a lot of things they were able to take the tactics they got from this Russian version of ice hockey which was more flowing and had more passing and was more like soccer and develop it to a specifically Soviet version of the Canadian game. Also a lot less physicality and the person who's really most responsible is the first captain and then the coach of the Central Army hockey team which would be the dominant team also of this early period and that is Anatoly Tarasov, who is the great genius coach and really established a Soviet soccer as, I'm sorry, ice hockey as the institutionally popular game.

Interviewer: Do that last bit again.

Edelman: Start from Anatoly Tarasov?

Interviewer: Yeah, yeah.

Edelman: Yeah Anatoly Tarasov was this great genius coach who the Soviets actually had the luck to come upon. Not all these things are inevitable though, and he established Soviet hockey right up to the time he would retire in nineteen seventy-two on the eve of the famous super series. And very quickly, after about a year, this hockey was seen as very dynamic and it was exciting and there was a lot more speed and a lot more pushing and physicality as well, even though the Soviet version was different. And ten thousand people would show up, fifteen for an important game and then. In nineteen forty-eight, the champions of Czechoslovakia came. They played a three game series and this drew forty thousand fans to a Dynamo Stadium, the largest stadium then at the time, outdoors in the middle of the winter, played at night and then among this incredible spectacle these hardly sufficient electric lights, lighting this primitively set up ice rink and people obviously freezing cold lubricated by plenty of vodka needless to say. And seeing that Soviets also much as in the case of Dynamo, were able to play on even terms with these the Czechs. And soon there were important games between say the army team and the air force, army team in Spartak, army team in the Dynamo hockey team. Interestingly enough there was no covered arena, there was no artificial ice rink in the Soviet Union until nineteen fifty-six, this meant not only that people had to sit and watch in the freezing cold (which for Russians was not a great tragedy, they enjoyed it to a certain extent) but it meant that you couldn't train for a large part of the year. So Tarasov's genius was that he was able to develop all of this dry land, non-ice methods of training. And so what is so important about Tarasov is that he was able to take the disadvantages of having had a different non-Canadian hockey tradition and allowed the facilities, turning them around to the advantage of the Soviets to create something that was specifically Soviet and different and very dynamic, in many ways more fun-friendly--if we can use the current term--than the Canadian version even. And certainly more interesting than the Russian version.

Interviewer: What kind of guy was he?

Edelman: Anatoly Tarasov is one of these meadow coaches if you want to call it that, obviously a control freak. Incredibly smart, needless to say, imaginative coach who had his vision of how things should be done. Ah, a human volcano in terms of emotions, a very irascible coach, difficult for those working under him to work with and perhaps more importantly and difficult for Tarasov in the long run, difficult for those over him to work with as well. He was constantly giving grief to the various ministers of sport and all the rest about demanding this and demanding that. At the same time, he had tremendous commitment to establishing his stamp on the Soviet game throughout the entire Soviet Union. So he was always publishing articles in the newspaper about how hockey should be played. He was publishing books, concerts, holding clinics. He wasn't just coaching his team and winning victory after victory and without him it's hard to imagine the eventual successes that they would have had. So some may say, yes it's the system, but every once in a while there is this rather historically accident, a genius comes along and the thing about Tarasov that is also interesting is that he was an intellectual and this is where the difference is between Soviet coaches and the Western coaches, the Canadians especially when they saw them in the seventy-two super series. So these were people who were well read, they had some notion of a broader education that we have. Eventually Soviet coaches had to have degrees from Institutes of Physical Culture and they had to take a scientific approach. What that really meant was they were perceived by the rest of society's intellectuals and therefore part of that meant that they had to be coming up with something new. Innovation, originality was part of their charge. Whereas for the rest of the coaches, basically one practices by repeating customs and methods of training, well that of course is, the nineteen nineties were much more scientific than they used to be. But a lot of that we got from the Soviets and people like Tarasov.

Interviewer: Great. Now what was Tarasov's relationship historically with .Bobrov? Where they buddies?

Edelman: Tarasov was the captain of the first Soviet army Canadian style ice hockey team. In those days there were no coaches and basically there were twelve players on a team, so the captain was the coach. And so this role of the eventual sort of grand pupa of Soviet hockey would develop over time, but here you have the kind of classic case of Tarasov who wants to control the entire process and this offensive genius and star, Bobrov, the greatest Soviet athlete of all time, who basically didn't like going to the defensive half of the ice, saving himself. He didn't want to do the defensive half of the field, he wanted to score goals, he was the cliché proverbial knife through butter. He would just sort of charge through the defense where he was with pucker, with the ball and just through like both strength and speed and force of will managed to score goal after goal. Now this had its chance with Tarasov, but he was also this kind of free spirit, didn't always want to train at the right times and obviously didn't want to play defense. And if you were coach especially in something like ice hockey you've got to play two ways. And there is this tension then between Bobrov the individual, the star, and Tarasov the team man, the control freak, what we're sort of come to think of as being a typical Soviet coach. The thing is that in sport at this level, which is what we call high performance sport, stars are inevitable. Some of the people are going to be more talented than others and you need that of course to succeed. There's always a tension in any team sport between the team, the collective (if you want to you use it in the Soviet context) and that star (being able to blend). That is what makes the successes and failing to do that makes you failures. But there is always this tension then between Bobrov representing one version of, you could call this Soviet star system and there was a star system even though it wasn't as elaborate as we have in the West. But these were people who were featured in the press and on television and film documentaries and they were known. I mean people flocked. They asked them for their autographs, they got all the best girls, they went to the best restaurants, people asked them for requests for them to come play for their team. All kinds of offers were being thrown their way, and the Russians have what we call star syndrome. And, Bobrov was often accused of this and this made Tarasov completely nuts.

Interviewer: When they had decided that actually you could start competing internationally, competing in the Olympics--fifty-two, fifty-six--how, to what extent did individual sports, like track and field for instance represent something that was more like an ideal Soviet as opposed to the team. Talk a bit about the emphasis on the individual sports and significance of them.

Edelman: The Soviets were very much interested in eventually participating in the Olympic movement and they always interested in the sports that were on the Olympic program and most of those sports were individual sports. And certainly the lynch pin of the Olympics from the very beginning has been track and field. The Russians and the Soviets refer to it as the queen of sports and it really is this wonderful, it's the most basic and fundamental of all sports. To that extent it allows the Soviets or did allow the Soviets to see the link between track and field as this most pure expression of physicality in sport, to see the link between that and the ancient Olympic games. By doing that they established themselves as being part of this sort of long humanistic tradition that the founders of the modern Olympic movement intended, and let's just stress that they were reviving. And they wanted, as the Soviets wanted to associate themselves with that sort of version of humanism. On the other hand what was really attractive about track and field to the Soviets is that it was the most statistic of sports and it was the sport that you could most clearly use statistics to measure the on line improvement of human performance, which is what is attractive to a certain extent especially about track and field. So Soviets would measure their success especially under Stalin in building socialism. It wasn't about the kind of relations that were say constructed on the new factory floor and it wasn't about these new socialist institutions; it was measured in how many ingots of steel, how many tanks, how many trucks. So when you take something like track, which can be measured and is verifiable and gives you a kind of certainty, you can see the added attraction to the Sports Committee and to the sort of official Olympic version of sports. It's about improving--it's about surpassing the limitations of the human body, all things.

Interviewer: Talk about the significance of track and field and individual sports, the way of proving your superiority.

Edelman: The overall goal of participation in the Olympics is well known and was to establish the superiority of the socialistic Communist system for the rest of the world, and also to convince Soviets in there that they were living in the best place on earth. And one way of doing that obviously was to win the most medals that you could possibly win throughout this entire course of different disciplines in the Olympic Games. Track and field was one which not only was quantifiable and measurable and about improving performance and therefore demonstrating superiority, but it was also a sport. Because track and field was so verifiable statistically, when a success was achieved, a world record was achieved, it was something that could be irrefutably trumpeted to the rest of the world as proof of the superiority of socialism. It had a kind of empirical reality in this case because it's a sport that the rest of the world could see, it was an undeniable mark of achievement that both people inside and outside the Soviet Union could look and make sense of it.

Interviewer: Great. That's good. So let's talk a bit about the US, Soviet track and field. Well let's try.

Edelman: Yeah, Okay. Well simply that they want to prove through track and field that the Soviets, you know, there was one way of proving the superiority of Soviet sport. And yet, you know, it boomed in the late fifties, America is still dominant in track, particularly in the men's track and field. Yeah, they're still winning all the time and Igor Ter-Ovanesyan was talking about this. What was the significance of that and for them, that these US, Soviet track and field would meet and the eventuality that they would actually defeat the Soviets?

Edelman: It started with the nineteen fifty-six Olympics in Melbourne, starting with the victories of Vladine Kosk. Ah, really from about nineteen fifty-six onwards after the Melbourne Olympics, the Soviets had established a considerable presence but obviously not superiority in track and field at the Olympics. Both in fifty-six and then again in sixty, obviously this was primarily in woman's events where they saw the area of opportunity that the West was not as strong as they could be, this was something they could concentrate on and do well and they had also some not inconsiderable successes with men as well. So it was a curiosity kind of like the same curiosity we've seen, these confrontations before and I think there was also a genuine desire to have a meeting which was not so much a confrontation as an opportunity for some kind of friendly competition. We're here now in the later years of peaceful coexistence. It's nineteen sixty when the first meeting starts and therefore we're not in a kind of mode where the Soviets are determined to prove our superiority, and track and field is a particularly well suited sport for establishing this kind of friendly rivalry. Do you want to talk about why or not?

Interviewer: Oh, after the fifties, I mean fifty-six, they start competing with their hockey teams, in the Olympics for the first time and they start with why they start winning? Are they really better? The best players in the world?

Edelman: The Soviets take up the sport of hockey, Canadian style in nineteen forty-six. Eight years later in Stockholm, they win the World Championship in nineteen fifty-four. They beat in the finals a team of Canadian whatever, semi pros, amateurs, obviously the NHL is not sending their best people to the World Championships and of course they don't send them two years later to the Olympics in nineteen fifty-six in Italy. The Soviets win their two, also defeating the Canadians among others and there was a sense that maybe nineteen fifty-four was a mistake. But when nineteen fifty-six occurs it's clear that something is new on the horizon. And what made them successful was this shockingly new tactical and strategic approach to the game. Their skating ability, their passing ability, the fact that they were able to find space on the ice by using a completely different style of movement than the Canadians had ever done and the Canadians had been used to trying very hard but having a particular version of back and forth hockey and obviously a very physical one, were shocked by this completely new approach. So the success had something to do with the physical superiority of the athletes, these were among the very best athletes in the Soviet Union, a country of a quarter of a billion people at this point. And secondly they were taking an approach to the sport that was completely radically new and no one had developed a strategy to oppose yet.

Interviewer: And through the sixties they kept winning and it sort of almost became routine to keep winning in the Olympics and the Internet and World Championships.

Edelman: In nineteen fifty-six they won, and then that first generation of early stars, Bobrov and others, faded from the scene, and it took Tarasov another seven years to get back to the level that he had achieved in nineteen fifty-six. Starting in sixty-three they begin this incredible string of winning world championship after world championship, and Olympics after Olympics. And they become so dominant that the Canadians say, well if we can't send our best, our professionals, we want no part of playing against the Soviets. So they stop taking part in the World Championship and they stop taking part in the Olympics. So there is sense by the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies that there are no worlds left for the Soviets to conquer except the Canadian pros.

Interviewer: Okay. We'll come to that in a bit. Now, in mid-sixties, hockey got to be popular in the Soviet Union. Talk about the rivalry between, you know, for a while we've got Bobrov coach, coaching Spartak, and Tarasov coaching the Central Army team. Talk about this rivalry between them.

Edelman: The sixties really begins the golden eras of Soviet domestic hockey. You had in the Soviet Union a league composed of anywhere from twelve to fourteen teams in any year. And you had teams representing various institutions. You had the famous Central Army Team coached by Tarasov which was the dominant team. They were then being challenged by the Dynamo team, Dynamo Moscow, coached by Tarasov's collaborator on the national team, they were kind of the sort of fire and ice combination. Dynamo represented the secret police. And the other big team in Moscow was Spartak. Spartak is tremendously important in the history of Soviet sport not only for its ice hockey team but as the sports club which also had a very, very popular soccer team as well and it was known as the people's team. They were founded in nineteen thirty-five by the Communist Youth Organization, the famous consomal and the retail trades trust. They're actually known as the Lofty, Lofty is the Russian word for counter so they were sort of affectionately known as a team of the, sort of trades man and a team of the consumer sector if you want to say that, a team again of the people. And instantly both in soccer and ice hockey they became the fans' favorite. You can measure it easily in terms of attendance; they had much higher attendance than either the army or the police team. What you really have is different approaches to sport, different styles of play, different styles of managing the athletes, different approaches to the whole question of the star system between Spartak, which was really kind of only a Soviet version of a sports business, and the army and the police teams which were doing the kind of state-controlled Olympic version modernizing socially controlled, socially approving sport that we've talked about already. So it's kind of two different modes of watching sport, of organizing it, of looking at the body of inspecting even not just of practicing sport.

Interviewer: How about, in the mid sixties, you get Bobrov and Tarasov coaching the opposite teams?

Edelman: For the most part, especially because of Tarasov's genius, the Central Army was the dominating team of Soviet hockey throughout all areas. The difference between Tarasov and what would come later in the late seventies and eighties is that he did not control the acquisition of talent so radically through say the ability of the army to draft players literally, that the army team would not have competition during a season. So although it was close competition between Dynamo, Central Army, Spartak and maybe one or two other teams that occasionally from the provinces would emerge and be important. Bobrov comes to take over the coaching reins of Spartak in the mid sixties and in sixty-seven. Under him, they win a championship. He would then later leave Spartak and then his legacy of the players that he found they would win another one in nineteen sixty-nine. So it was tremendously exciting for the Moscow populace, they had their team, the people's team. Because remember they weren't for the cops and the army right? Their team to finally, actually win, to beat the Central Army team and so you have this very intense competition that filled the twelve thousand seat Palace of Sports every time these two teams played and it was incredibly intense and it was on television and people would be around the arena trying to get tickets and everybody would be talking about it on the subway. And Bobrov really, no one expected him to be a coach because there's this myth that great players don't make great coaches and maybe he wasn't a great coach but he was able to assemble a pretty good team.

Interviewer: And how was their personal relationship--Tarasov and Bobrov?

Edelman: Well, Tarasov and Bobrov had not had a very good personal relationship from the very early stage that they had taken part, together on the League Liners, the Central Army in the forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight series and in fact some of their personal rivalry and their different styles led to Bobrov's leaving the army team for the air force team in nineteen fifty-one. So they never were particularly friendly and so over many years there's a guy who represents everything Tarasov hates about big time sport, getting over his main rival. You can imagine how intensive it was personally to Tarasov, who was never one to take anything but personally.

Interviewer: So in the mid to late sixties how big of a star was Anatoly Firsov?

Edelman: Anatoly Firsov might be close to as big as Wayne Gretski became in ice hockey in Canada. People like that became stars, especially with the advent of television. And all the dominant teams were in Moscow and all the games that were shown on national television to eleven time zones, to this mass population were from Moscow and inevitably even if they didn't make a cult of you, if you were that good you became well known.

Interviewer: And he was like a star?

Edelman: He was a star in the Soviet context which is that he didn't drive a Cadillac he drove a Volvo. He didn't endorse Communism but nevertheless he's someone who had privilege. Obviously not privileging a life of luxury like a Western professional but someone who was admired and looked up to and considered to use the cliché, someone to emulate.

Interviewer: Let's talk about the significance of this match in sixty-nine, where Tarasov takes his team off the ice, Brezhnev's in the stands, championship game. It's almost like it's the beginning of Tarasov's major conflict with the top sports officials.

Edelman: It's one of the clichés of Soviet sports history that Brezhnev was a passionate fan of hockey and deeply interested in and obviously supported the game to the hilt, which was an important part of its success. And he tried to go to as many games as possible and there's this famous sort of government luxury box where he and the Politburo and all of his friends would hang out and smoke and drink and watch the games. You would never get to see this when the games were on television, by the way. And there's this famous incident in nineteen sixty-nine in the middle of the third period when a Central Army goal was disallowed. And Tarasov in his volcanic beauty decides it's time to take his players off the ice. They go to the locker room, he refuses to come out, and eventually no one can prevail upon him and the great leader of the Soviet people, the General Secretary himself, has to come down and prevail upon Tarasov. Eventually he comes out, eventually they play the rest of the game. But this is not the kind of thing you do even if you're Tarasov and clearly this was consistent with a pattern of insubordination that had begun as early as nineteen forty-eight really and was typical of his way of doing things and led to his eventually having his welcome worn out.

Interviewer: Just say the last bit again. Sort of versions of his stance, he takes the team off the ice. Is it a smart move?

Edelman: So there's Tarasov in the locker room. First the match officials come and say, would you please come out. Then the head of the hockey federation comes out, would you please come out. Then the Minister of Sport, finally Tarasov won't come out and finally the great leader of the Soviet people Brezhnev himself has to move him, his considerable presence, out of the luxury box where he is sitting watching the game, down to the locker room and finally, basically orders Tarasov to come out and completes the rest of the game. This is not a good career move, there if you're Tarasov and clearly this was one part of his out wearing his welcome with the highest officials.

Interviewer: What were the parts that were wearing thin? Why was he annoying the people?

Edelman: Well he would, any time he would want go to say--anytime Tarasov wanted to go to an international match and the leadership didn't think this was the right thing to do, he would yell and write letters and go to the press and maybe if he couldn't even get on television and demand what he would want. If he could not acquire a player, if the high hockey federation would not release somebody from say a provincial team to come play for the army team, he would go up to high bludgeon mode. And over the years he made many, many enemies. Apparently his KGB file was filled with all these complaints by others against his behavior.

Interviewer: What sort of behavior at that time?

Interviewer: They always say that the dream was to play for the best, the Canadian, the professionals. In the late sixties, early seventies it looks like that dreams might actually have a chance of coming true. What is the context behind this beginning of negotiations?

Edelman: The possibility of playing against Canadians really becomes a kind of serious potential reality when the Canadians themselves realize the futility of playing the Soviets with their version of amateurs. And so it becomes a possibility or a desire on both parts to make this work, then the task becomes finding the right mode that would be fair to both sides and would allow the most level playing field. That, as we know from any Soviet or Western negotiations is, it's not an easy matter and there's no reason for it on matters of hockey to be any different. So it was a protracted process, it took three or four years with the Canadian side having its concerns and the Soviet sides have theirs. The only aspect of the political context is that there was uncertainty on the Soviet side, especially at the highest levels of the Politburo of whether they should go forward with this. Tarasov obviously wanted this. He had gotten to the point where he could go no further in achieving a professional goal, as a professional. It had nothing to do with politics on that level. You want to play against the very best if you already know that you are playing at a high level, and there was some uncertainty. Brezhnev himself, according to recent posts of a journalistic reports, was very much uncertain about whether victory could be achieved, and he wasn't sure whether they should go forward with this. In fact, he was actually one of the leading Soviet sports commentators, an East Soviet, leading Soviet TV announcer who had a lot of influence at the Central Committee and Politburo levels, who was one of the figures, among several, who urged Brezhnev to go forward and make this step. And eventually this was done.

Interviewer: What were the risks?

Edelman: A great deal of prestige internationally and domestically had been gained by the success of what the Soviets called a hallowed ice militia. They had all these enormous victories against the best, or at least they were the second best, the West and the East, because they'd played the Czechs after all and others as well. What would happen if it turned out that this was all an error? That's when they take the really very best, they would get their clocks cleaned, assuming that the clocks worked., and so there was real fear that they would be exposed.

Interviewer: Great. So the winner of seventy-two, they go to the Olympics again and they win again. Tarasov's the coach, Firsov's on the team and another victory after that something changes. What happens and why is there a--I mean they're simply at the top of their form and something changes?

Edelman: After the victory at Saprov in seventy-two the next major turning point is the World Championship in Prague later that spring. Soviet officials meet with Canadian officials and finally this agreement is worked out of an eight-game series for Canada then for Moscow, and it looks like it's finally going to happen. There are various rumors and questions about why was it that Tarasov lost the coaching position. The sort of standard reason that we've usually been given is that the players were given great bonuses for winning the Olympics and had been rewarded accordingly and then Tarasov and others wanted higher wages as well. Well that's true enough basically for many people at the highest level in the Federation and even the Politburo this was seen as a last straw. Ah, of a person who had already been difficult and a kind of prima donna and very hard to work with, so he was eventually let go. And the irony of course, is that here he had created this moment which was going to be decisive in his career, and he had this certain stance.

Interviewer: What do you think that meant to him?

Edelman: Judging by his subsequent behavior and his criticism of Soviet national coaches thereafter, this had to have been a devastating blow to Tarasov. He did not take it gracefully, not that he took anything particularly gracefully, and he would often appear in the press both at the time of the Super Series and subsequently with all kinds of very sharp and pointed criticism about tactical and strategic approaches taken by other Soviet coaches and, of course, what he would have done had he still been there etc. So there's no question that you could work your entire life and career to get to a point and then achieve the possibility of doing something and then not get to do it. And worse to have the person who is at the helm being one of your arch personal rivals because you're rivals, because it turns out that the person that was turned to at this point was Bobrov.

Interviewer: He becomes the coach?

Edelman: It's often felt that Bobrov became the coach or was asked to be the coach among a variety of other possibilities, not because he had such a great success with Spartak but that he was someone who really made very few demands on the Ice Hockey Federation. He was happy to take the job and was willing to go along with what they wanted. The other thing, although he was not seen as a kind of great tactician, he did the smart thing that any sort of players coach, which was what he after all was, being the great individual star he was. And he had an assistant who was a very good sort of man and was able to supplement him in the areas that he was weak. But clearly Tarasov was looking at another wing, another approach to the game and in some sense they're going away from the direction that he had pioneered after the very moment, as far as he's concerned, when they should be following it. I mean it's almost as if he could have accepted anybody, except Bobrov, as his successor.

Interviewer: They used one of the top players, Firsov, at this time as well?

Edelman: One of the realities of national teams in any sport in any country is that you have prodigies and groups and factions. If the coach from Arsenal becomes the coach of the national team inevitably he takes peak place in Arsenal and so some of the same thing happened here--there were fewer players from Central Army who had always been the basis of the national team and more from other teams. In one case Firsov who was, could be said was coming to the end of his career, he was thirty at this time but still a terrific player, but known as a Tarasov man. He has not been on the team, a lot of others as well and it's like, who's this great powerful scorer forward for Spartak who was obviously an ally of Bobrov who's placed on the team. He'd been on it before and he becomes the star of the Canadians, he's a leading scorer, he's at the best plus/minus rating during the entire tournament and again, Firsov surely must have been gnashing his teeth at that time as well. But that's sports.

Interviewer: Okay, so they come to Canada in September nineteen seventy-two. So as to set the scene, what's at stake here? What's the sense of anticipation for this?

Edelman: Both the players inside the Soviet camp and everything that they said for public consumption is that, we're going there to learn. If we lose eight-nothing, it won't be a tragedy. And so there was a very conscious attempt made to lower expectations. Certainly with the Soviet public. One thing that actually worked to their advantage is that this took place at the same time as the seventy-two Olympics were taking place in Munich, which in many ways represented the athergy of Soviet sport. I mean they really did fantastically in the seventy-two Olympics. So if they had not done that well in ice hockey against the Canadians, it sort of would have been chalked up to experience and then people would say, oh, but we're good at all these other things. And in fact, it's quite interesting that when the games began to take place, they were on the back pages of the Soviet sports newspapers. They really were buried under all of this Olympic news and Buberhof before the games would say, oh well, we might lose eight-nothing, they'd either lose one or two, we'll lose one or two. And so there was uncertainty because it's the same kind of leap into the unknown that they were doing in nineteen forty-five. It's kind of like, I remember in nineteen sixty-seven when the American Football League was going to play in the first Super Bowl and I had always been following the American Football League. I'd been a fan of it and I'd wanted them to do well, but who knew, because there were these giants from the old league, and it was very much the same kind of phenomenon of uncertainty. If you didn't override that, with all of the elaborate hoopla of the Cold War and the sense of expectation and hope, that here is something that the Soviets had achieved on their own, in a field very much on their own, developed a whole new way of doing this and this was going to be, as they always liked to say, the great examination.

Interviewer: Yeah, so would it be right, twenty-five years, thirty years after they began playing Canadian Hockey, they come to Canada and play the best hockey players in the world, and what happens on the first game, do they lose?

Edelman: They take the ice in the Montreal Forum, the most famous arena in all of hockey, and very quickly the Canadians score two goals. At this point the Soviets don't know what to expect and they think well, oh my god, the write is on, every thing we feared is about to come true. Yet, they managed to persevere. They found their rhythm and style. And eventually they won seven to three, which was a huge enormous shock, needless to say. And one of their sort of, very telling moments, of their mutual miscomprehensions of all this is that the Canadians, not knowing they're at the end of international matches, because they hadn't played them--these were the pros after all--that you shook hands with your opponents in the same way you did during the playoff game, went back to their locker rooms and didn't shake hands with the Soviets. It looked like they were so shocked that they were being poor sports on top of it. And back in camp, back in Moscow, back in the entire Soviet Union where this game is being shown fairly early in the morning, people were as equally stunned. I mean they really didn't know what to make of it, and sometimes they only were able to make sense of it after the subsequent games where was a defeat, a tie, and then yet another victor. So they had played the Canadians in Canada on more than even terms.

Interviewer: Now how big a deal was this series? You must follow hockey, you live in America, the US. You know, you might not have heard about this thing. Was this a big thing?

Edelman: The Super Series obviously was huge in Canada, and one has to understand the Canadian passion for the game. The importance it means in Canadian culture in the sense of pride that they get, and here is one thing that we're really good at, and we're the best in the world, and here are these guys come along, and twenty-five years, and they're claiming that they're as good as we are, and they've got this totally different way of playing than we have. In Canada, of course, there was a huge obsession. I think in the Soviet Union it was placed in context as I've said of other sports successes. But it was important, you've gotta remember hockey was the second most important sport. Soccer was the first. Had the Soviets won the World Cup then you would have seen much rejoicing in Red Square. In this case you probably saw a few vodka bottles consumed and some general happiness. But I would say that happiness was muted at this point. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, I think in Europe, certainly, there was a tremendous interest in how the European School of Hockey, as it was called, would fare against the Canadians, and there was a great deal of interest at the time in the United States as well. All the games were showing in the United States and there was extensive press coverage as well.

Edelman: So try to imagine here we have now shocked the Canadians and supposedly they are going to return home for what could be seen as a cake walk, right. Four games in Moscow, on their home turf. Everything should be fine. What Bobrov does at this point, subsequently would be severely criticized precisely by Tarasov. Throughout all of Tarasov's career, and it had been the standard Soviet practice, the players lived the entire season in training camps, away from their families. They got to visit them, maybe one day a week, maybe if there was a game that day, not even then. And what Bobrov, being again the less controlling players' coach, did, was he allowed the players to stay at home during the Moscow games. Now, a Soviet player getting to stay at home when everybody wants, particularly when it's everybody is coming by, and everybody's being very social, and there's always kinds of parties in honor of this great occasion, he's obviously gonna be distracted. But in addition, he's not living in a big palatial home where he can relax in his Jacuzzi and get ready for the game. It's a small apartment. His kids are there, his wife is there, his grandparents are there. They're all living together. There's a tremendous amount of distraction, so ironically, probably at the one moment when it would have been wise for Bobrov, to use this standard Soviet practice in keeping these guys away from all of this excitement, and allowing him to chill out. Obviously he's not thinking it now because he's not with us any more, but Tarasov would later criticize him severely for this particular mistake, and it does seem to have been a fair, because they won one game, and then they proceeded to lose all three of the next games. But great credit to the Canadians who showed a tremendous amount of fighting spirit.

Interviewer: Just as a finishing thought, when you should have adopted this technique, you just didn't. What's the irony there?

Edelman: Ironically, here's Bobrov, the players' coach, allowing his players to stay at home instead of following the standard Soviet practice of being in training camp. Therefore this very well may have been the one moment for Bobrov to follow the Tarasov practice and keep them in training camp away from all the excitement, away from all of the distraction, and allowing them to concentrate on the game. When he doesn't this was seen as a great mistake.

Interviewer: Talk about the scale of sports that they competed at. What was the objective of this?

Edelman: The Soviets chose to take part in the Olympic Games because they wanted to impress the world with the superiority of their system. The way you win the games is you win the most medals. The way you win the most medals is you contest every one of these sports around the entire range of the Olympic winter and summer program and no matter how obscure, no matter how little practiced in your own country. No matter how little interest there is among thousand of spectators in that sport, so you channel resources in that direction, or that variety of directions, and develop athletes across this whole range of sports. That way you're able to achieve your objective. This is kind of like the command economy, right? It has nothing to do with the interest in the nation itself, in these sports. It's not a reflection of any kind of market. Rather it's the State saying, here is our goal, here is our diplomatic goal, and this is the mechanism and these are the demands we want to place on those mechanisms in order to achieve it. It's like all the great steel mills, and the dams, and all the rest of it. They had made all these things that nobody ever needed.

Interviewer: Give some examples in sports.

Edelman: Let me think. Most of the sports on the Olympic program. Now let it be said that soccer, ice hockey and basketball were on the Olympic program and did have followings. Never attracted large audiences. Only episodically. Maybe gymnastics, maybe figure skating, track and field once or twice, was able to fill large arenas. So it didn't matter that no one came to these games. It didn't matter that no one bought the tickets. Television would show them and athletes would be basically assigned to them, upon the evaluation of their particular physical characteristics, regardless necessarily of the desires that they had to participate in any other sport. So if you were maybe good at soccer and wanted to play soccer, but your body was of the sort that you were really a better volleyball player, you would be channeled to volleyball, regardless of your desires. So this undermined their success in some of these more popular sports.

Interviewer: Talk about the skills, the system. It was said that Olympic athletes were at the top of some great pyramid.

Edelman: The whole idea of the Soviet sport system was to portray this image of strength, and power, and especially they had a slogan, Masters come from Mass Sport. And this idea that millions of people were participating in fun, this joyous and happy participation in sport at factories, in villages etc., gleaned these champions. To a certain extent that's true but in fact the sports systems were a way of avoiding--getting around--the weaknesses and problems of lack of facilities and essentially of comparative poverty to the West that the Soviet Union experienced, which you did in a sports system where you found athletes and tracked them down, and then brought them.

Interviewer: You are tracking them down?

Edelman: What in fact was the experience of the Soviets was that they were compensating for their weaknesses by creating a system which allowed them to find young athletes, bring them to those few centralized facilities that did exist (which were never as elaborate or as well financed or as comfortable as those in the west), and concentrate that limited facilities and resources on these small numbers. So in fact where they talked about millions of people being involved in participant sport, I mean now those figures. We now know those figures were inflated. Maybe about ninety thousand people were involved in the business of high performance sport. That's coaches, officials, doctors from ecologists, athletes, the whole thing. So really what you had is instead of this vast pyramid, through which you would filter up to the top and become champions, you had a kind of giant a-frame. I remember stilts under a very weak foundation. And so in order to become efficient at locating the talent and bringing it to the few places where they had the facilities to train in, but in fact the way it worked out was more compensation for weaknesses and lack of wealth, than for some kind of proof of the superiority of the system.

Interviewer: If you could, recite the bit about gymnastics as part of this.

Edelman: In many ways gymnastics is the sort of perfect or ideal sport in terms of the way the Olympic system functions. They were able to find young, especially women, because that was more important for the women to be young, than male gymnasts, throughout the country, and then bring them to centers especially in Moscow, where the biggest center was. And in this kind of very hot house environment, trainees, men and women from a young age, always competing against each other on a daily basis, always trying to get the favor of the coaches. The coaches playing all kinds of mind games on them, getting them to train through injuries, making sure that the ones who did the right things, whatever those might be, were the ones who got to go on the international trips. And do you know there was not a great deal of domestic interest in gymnastics. People liked gymnastics, but it wasn't as if that was the need of the week. I can remember going to the Soviet Union for the first time and spending a year in nineteen seventy and talking to my friends and say, you've got a gymnastics meeting. They would look at me like I'd lost my mind because people didn't just sort of hang out and do this. If it was on television, because it's a sport that the State wanted to popularize, but it was one that was magnificently controllable, and therefore you know, was possible to achieve these championships on the international level. The reason gymnastics is good, is there are lots of medals in it, so that you can inflate your medal count by being successful in that sport.

Interviewer: Good, thank you. You mentioned about ninety thousand people so far in this system, and you mentioned pharmacologists. Talk a bit about the, now this film is gonna focus on the sixties and the seventies. I'll only get it towards the eighties. But, they had scientists and doctors who were studying the way of the human body for sports, and out of that came an interest, as you know, in the use of anabolic steroids and drugs. If you can talk about that a bit.

Edelman: One of the distinctive aspects of Soviet sport from the mid fifties on was the application of science and what came to be known as Sports Science, to what had in the West been seen as kind of practical activities. And this was really based upon a German tradition of sports medicine and sports science. And in that process the question of finding the right foods, the right legal drugs, which may not enhance performance but might in other ways improve the ability of athletes to say stay healthier, avoid illness and things like that. That questions like pharmacology became part of the mix of Soviet science. And in the application of these methods, obviously what you're seeing is the so-called hyper scientific and rationalistic approach to all things, and in this being applied to sport. The use of illegal things like anabolics and testosterone producing preparations and things like that, begins to emerge in world sport, in the sixties. And in some way and following obviously the East German example the Soviets having the scientific approach to sport were kind of right for taking this up. And the line as we now know between what is sports science, and what is in some sense performance-enhancing pharmacology that would be seen as illegal, is extremely ambiguous, and the process by which that barrier, if you wanna call it that, was penetrated or overcome. But we're obviously not sure of in terms of the history of it, but in terms of world sport this was happening, these were people who were not ignorant of what was going on in the rest of the world, and of course we now know that eventually drugs became an important part of Soviet success. Interestingly enough, in the case of East Germany the archives have been opening all kinds of revelations, and very specific and detailed State control have emerged. We don't know whether a system like that existed in the Soviet Union because these archives are not yet open. They remain closed. They'll probably remain closed among other things because some of the people who are running post Soviet sport today where the same people who were running it back in the old days and surely probably had some responsibility in these areas. There's no question that the State's Sports Committee made some of these substances available. And that athletes and their coaches were under great pressure to perform and win victories, as all athletes and coaches are. And the culmination of the availability and the pressure surely led to the use and consumption of these at a very high rate.

Interviewer: To what extent is it accurate to say the Soviet Union achieved its great success in sport because they cheated? And how important was drugs as part of that cheating?

Edelman: One part of the if you would call it genius, of choosing the Olympic movement in the Olympic Games as your playing field of decision, one in which you were to achieve your diplomatic aims, was that you were in fact able to have your full time fully paid athletes--and not necessarily professionals in the full western sense of the term--go against athletes from other countries who were at least formerly amateur, and capable of training in a less serious way than yours. So that in one way is the most obvious way of sort of stacking the deck in your favor. And obviously part of that, especially in the early years when the international Olympic committee was really naive on the matter of drugs, was to achieve considerable successes using drugs. We don't know who; we don't know how, but more likely than not the level of use of illegal drugs was very high. Whether it was so much more radically high than Western countries, especially a place like Western Germany at that time, we really don't know. If there is such a vast difference then you can explain the difference by simply the question of drugs. It may be they had better pharmacology in the sense that they were able to avoid detection better than some others. But there's no question that when you get to the surely late sixties and early seventies, illegal drugs are becoming a part of high performance sport across the board, both amateur and professionals. And to think that the Soviets would in any way not be part of that phenomenon is obviously naive, so it's not so much a question of whether they cheated, it's whether they're cheating, especially on this matter. It was not so widely different from the kinds of things that were done in the West as well. Because not all as we know, Western amateurs were fully amateur, they were subsidized in various ways as well. American scholarship athletes obviously were subsidized in that way. So that the dozens which are suggested of a kind of, if not cheating, certainly a way of trying to stack the deck in your favor are not as clear cut as may be we thought in the past.

Interviewer: Good. Now when they played against Western professionals, dominance became more equality.

Edelman: Right. Now this image of what came to be known as the big red machine, the Soviet Sports Machine which produced this again conveyer belt of Korbut-like champions. Right so you get this image again of them not really being human. The very image comes from the Olympics. And so the idea and the term of dominance very much played into the images of the Cold War, because we wanted to talk about the military threat, and the Soviet threat, and all of the danger that was implied by this dominant culture, and here sport is often seen as this kind of metaphor or substitute for war, which it really isn't, and dominance in that was seen as kind of translatable, in terms of their dominance militarily, which we also know was a bit of a false impression as well, when the Soviets came to play against professionals in sports like soccer, or ice hockey.

Edelman: The Olympics were one thing, but if you look at the entire history of the country formerly known as the Soviet Union right up to the end, when they came to play professionals, in a variety of sports where professionals were the dominant group in a particular area like soccer, or ice hockey, or basketball, the winner was not so much one of dominance but of equality, a kind of equality, and I think this is important because when their best athletes played the West's best athletes, it wasn't a picture of dominance of this mighty Soviet machine, it was one of being able to play as well as, but not necessarily radically better than, the rest of the world. It gives you more a sense of participation in the sort of cultural forms that sport represents, rather than one of control. And when you realize that this is really the kind of actual experience that both their highest level athletes had and their fans had, then it's a very different kind of situation. I also think that the difference is somewhat more marked for Americans as opposed to say Canadians and Europeans, and that's because Canadians know the Russians through ice hockey and have been able to, because of their great passion for the game, that is the Canadians learned a lot about the way the Russians played the game, but also had come to learn from them and then achieve this kind of level of equality with them. In Europe people know the Soviets not just through the Olympics but through soccer. Through these various European cups and tournaments, and there the Soviet record was one of tragic insufficiency. It's one of the great questions of why the Soviet national team, which produced a lot of good individual players, never really was very successful on the international level, and their club sides, especially in these various European cup competitions, were not then all that good as well. So if you're someone who's living in England or France and see these teams come, and they come and sometimes they're okay, and sometimes they're not, you've got a very different picture of what Soviet sport is, and it represents, than the rest of the world, especially the United States. If you only watch the Olympics.

Interviewer: Yep, couple of other, just one point. Could you say in like a very short sentence that could be a link that where it began competing in the Olympics, soccer became less than important. Just close that thought.

Edelman: One of the consequences of spreading your talent across the more than forty sports of both the winter and summer Olympic schedules is that you get a deletion of talent toward the most popular sports. If you look at the case in Capitalist countries, the talent pool gravitates to the most remunerative sports, and they're relatively few in number. What was clearly of the Soviet system was that it drew a lot of great athletes who might have been really good at these sports, like soccer, ice hockey and basketball, which had huge popularity world wide, but not playing roller baller or becoming a wrestler or a woman in kayaking. And it clearly diminished their capacity to be successful at the very sports that their citizens cared most about. In a sense you had the command economy, the big red machine if you wanna call it that, producing things again, that people didn't want, more kayakers, and not producing the things that the people did want, which was more victories in the sports that they loved.

Interviewer: Good.

Edelman: Sport in the Soviet Union was not exclusively a tool of State control. And a lot of it has to do with the nature of sport itself, which is, there is an irreducible element of spontaneity. Not all the games can be fixed. Here is a society which sees itself as being a planned society, and in the field of sport there is only so much you can plan. It's got spontaneity. The inescapable unpredictability of sport which made it a true form of popular culture in the Soviet Union which people could consume in their own way. No one was ever forced at gun point to attend a soccer game, or even a Kayak race in the entire course of Soviet history. People made their own choices about which sports they were going to attend, not the State. They were able to make their choices about who their heroes were. They were able to go to the games and, more often than not, behave in disorderly ways. They were able among themselves, perhaps after a few tots of vodka, to tell jokes which were maybe a little bit anti-establishment about sports. Even in the newspapers you were able to have a discourse of criticism about sports that was relatively honest. If a reporter felt this tactic was wrong or something, he or she could say that. And so, while one has to be careful about overstating the case, sport as it was consumed by the Soviet public represented a kind of arena for perhaps escape from politics. But even a kind of immediate resistance. Which was relatively safe, especially in the national republics, where if you waited for your team from Georgia, or from Armenia, or from Lithuania, it was a safe way of expressing anti-Russian sentiment which you couldn't do out on the streets. So sport represented a kind of arena where the kind of Soviet Union that will eventually emerge for better or for worse, was contested. And that capacity even in this limited range for sport to be a place where that contestation could occur tells us something about really the ultimate fate of the Soviet Union to a certain extent. This was one part of life which the State could not fully control, and to that extent it played this corrosive role, and it was after a part of a consumer sector which was always under supported, and feel its own small, perhaps larger way, had something to do with why there's no more Soviet Union.

Interviewer: Sportswise. So you only have stars like Olga Korbut and Tarasov, and people who don't really like to operate by you know by the rules of the game. Um, maybe they use better names and talk about them as people who chafed against the system. It was an inherent contradiction of a whole system.

Edelman: The Soviet Union throughout its history was attempting to get its population to work hard, to accept authority and to do the right thing as far as the State was concerned. And really from the nineteen thirties one of the things that they tried to do is create what we would call role models. Which is a socially conservative version of social mobility which comes from nineteenth century German philosophers. And the idea starting with the famous labor heroes was that these are people who were labor stars, who worked very hard, achieved great successes and should be emulated. The other thing you have in the Soviet Union was--especially in the late thirties--aviators, who were seen as great stars and people to be emulated. And, in the late thirties you had film stars emerging, people like this, and so none of the things that the State did want to use is usually starts as ways of inculcating the values. Now, they would be trotted out at various occasions and made to appear to be saying the right things, and doing the right things. So you could have Valed Rumel coming back from the nineteen sixty-four Olympics after he wins the high jump and says all the right things about Communism being great and terrific, and then going back to his fabulous duchy and his fabulous car, and eating fabulous caviar, and thinking who knows what. So the State always used these stars, but it was kind of like juggling hand grenades because these were people who were being privileged, who obviously because they were stars and were successful and good in their fields had a fairly high level of self esteem, and needless to say self-interest, and maybe weren't always as we would say in the sports context, team players. But, the idea of a kind of bland collectivism, purely and simply crushing these individuals who on their own are attempting to establish their own identities, it would be a simplification. Because the State needed stars as much as the stars needed the State. Because the State had the infrastructure, the facilities, the star making, if you wanna call it that. So it's a tricky question, and even in sports that fine line between the star and the team, between again the individual who may be different in the collective, is problematic in any sporting context. You get teams that are filled with stars that are terrible disasters, and you can have teams that have great players that know how to find their combination of teamwork and individuality which makes for a true sporting greatness.

Interviewer: Okay, on defection. Very quickly, why did more athletes defect? As you know people defected–belly dancers, musicians, writers were defecting.

Edelman: Athletes were not necessarily intellectuals. They were not mavericks for the most part. The vast majority of them were team players, and they more or less generally accepted authority, those who had relatively privileged lives in the Soviet context, and defecting for them was a much bigger step. Also for people like artists and writers, and ballet dancers who may have been more cultured, may have spoken foreign languages, may have been what the Russians say, more cosmopolitan, or internationalists, the idea of living abroad would not have been so intimidating, and wasn't intimidating for others. I think for a lot of athletes the idea of working in a different context where you're very much on your own, responsible for your own training, feeding yourself, for housing yourself, getting your own transportation was really intimidating. And doing it in a context where you have to learn a foreign language, where if you're not a particularly educated guy, that's a hard skill to acquire, these are all things that until the very end kept most people from defecting.

Interviewer: Okay, looking backwards from a circle perspective of the Soviet sporting system, did it work?

Edelman: Any system has certain goals, some of which are achieved, some are not achieved. If the goal which was stated to achieve Olympic dominance for the purpose of depressing the rest of the world, in one level it was successful. On the other hand it's hard to see the entire rest of the world going Communist, or socialist, on the basis of whether a pole vaulter wins the gold medal. I always had this idea that the Prime Minister of an African country calls in the Agriculture Minister and says, well should we collectivize or privatize, and the Minister of Agriculture says well let's look at the sports pages. You know I don't think it worked that way, and so we know of course the fact that in the larger sense it didn't work. It was one of the parts that were in some sense dysfunctional. Otherwise we'd still be sitting here with the archives closed and the Soviet Union would still exist.

Interviewer: Okay. Sports machine–did it change the way athletics were backed around the world?

Edelman: Certainly the area in which the Soviets were able to demonstrate quick dominance was in women's sports.

Interviewer: Just generally, what is this big machine?

Edelman: One of the things about having success across the board meant not only success in all sports but success for men and women as well, and the great successes that the Soviets had in women's sport posed a challenge for the rest of the world in things like Titlemein in America, and the vast explosion of women's sports that we see in the West today could probably never have occurred without the example of Soviet sport.

Interviewer: So in a broad sense, Soviet sports changed sports worldwide?

Edelman: Soviet sport changed world wide on the questions of gender, and on the questions of science and using a rational and innovative approach to sport.