Presented below is a pre-publication excerpt from the PBS series companion book, RED FILES: Secrets from the Russian Archives, written by George Feifer, published by TV Books, distributed by HarperCollins.

Soviet Sports Wars

Sport in a socialist country is a state concern, and is structured according to the principles of amateurism.
    - Highlights of Soviet Sport, Moscow, 1972

The Communist Party of the USSR and the Soviet Government pay permanent attention to improving the welfare, health, and physical and mental development of the working class and students. Physical education and sports are increasingly a regular part of Soviet citizen's lives.
    - Moscow's Ready to Host the 1980 Olympics,
    Moscow, 1979

I don't need any sports lovers but real sportsmen, champions.
     - A sports official in a large Soviet factory, 1973

I turn to you with a very pressing problem. Our city has a large field house, sport schools and many sporting clubs. Everywhere, however, only talented children are wanted.
    - A mother to Soviet Sport magazine, 1978

Let's begin Soviet sport's saga of brilliant wins and larger losses with an Olympian turnaround in 1952. Four decades had passed since Russia, well in her discredited pre-revolutionary past, last participated in the Games. Stockholm, the host city in 1912, liked the amiable, well-spoken Russian contingent, but Marxist-Leninist historians were quick to point out that it was all blue blood. Doctrine taught that the exploiting privileged of tsarist Russia - or, as the propagandists often called it, the rotten Empire - deserved no admiration. The supposedly all-new socialist republic that installed itself in 1917 claimed to be motivated by an utterly new approach to everything, down to the Games. Denouncing them as a Capitalist institution, Moscow condemned the drive for victory in sports as bourgeois thinking.

As if to manifest the Dictatorship of the Proletariat's tendency to contradict its own revolutionary thinking, Soviet sports writers simultaneously criticized the performance of the pre-revolutionary competitors. Still, logic was never the strong suit of Soviet exegesis. The point remained clear to everyone: upstanding Soviet athletes, pure et dure, were motivated only by love of their sport and of all humanity. Therefore, they would never take part in the profoundly anti-socialist Olympics that duped its followers and distracted them from acquiring a class-conscious view of the world.

And so it went, for most of socialist Russia's 35 years - until Soviet teams entered the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki. Depending on how seriously you took Kremlin statements - or on your view of how seriously Russians took them - the government's explications of its total reversal might have provoked tears or laughter. George Orwell's Animal Farm best caught the spirit of the calculated flip-flops declaimed with a torrent of slogans for erasing memory of the old way and instilling devotion to the opposite new. When the pigs who took over the farm from humans want to shift gears, the old bleat of "Two legs good, four legs better" is all but reversed. By 1952, that had become a Politburo trademark, enabling the switching of all sorts of high canons to their antithesis like some ice pirouette performed to vigorous applause.

About Face! was ordered for a hundred notions and institutions. Soviet governments abolished and restored the death penalty as if zig-zagging in waters patrolled by enemy submarines. "Revolutionary" divorce went from a wholly private concern - with a plaintive request for the parties to send a postcard to local registries so they could update their files - to a matter of state importance and very difficult to obtain. The superbly creative avant-garde painting, poetry and theater that lent its hopes as well as its art to the revolution was squelched in favor of the "socialist realism" to be described in Chapter V: a return to many of the stultifying conventions against which artists and intellectuals had originally rebelled. Officers' epaulets and other symbols of the old, despised imperialist militarism were brushed up and restored to service, sometimes on the shoulders of former tsarist aristocrats themselves.

So the U-turn in sports policy - its angles actually slightly softened by participation in a few international events during the five years preceding 1952 - fit the Soviet pattern of restoring pre-revolutionary goals and practices, even some of the most hated, when it was expedient. Good citizens didn't always know why they were ordered right when they'd been so righteously going left. However, the answer was clear about why teams were sent to Helsinki: after the decades of trauma and the difficulties of attaining excellence in sport, the Kremlin saw enticing possibilities for itself in the 1952 Games. Its athletes had trained their hearts out in postwar conditions that were difficult at best, and often severe. Now it was time for their hard-honed talent to sway the world - to demonstrate the Communist system's superiority, promote respect and trade with the outside world, capture Third World hearts and minds - by winning. Their achievements in the Finnish capital clearly justified the decision to send them there, for they amassed enough points to win the unofficial team championship. The feat was even more remarkable in light of the fact that many of the Soviets faced world-class competitors for the first time there in Helsinki!

Four years later, they captured more gold medals in skyng, speed skating and ice-hockey, the latter more stunning than the others because the sport had been introduced to Russia only after World War II. Whatever else those successes illustrated, they showed a country leaping from relative backwardness to proven supremacy in almost a single bound. Further evidence of the remarkable achievement came at that year's summer games in Melbourne, where Soviet competitors again won more points and medals than any others. The almost unthinkable results astonished and dismayed the West, most of which, as in its under-estimation of Soviet science before the launching of Sputnik 1 the following year, was confident of its athletic superiority over dark, disturbed Russia. The American reaction in particular bore a faint resemblance to the shock and outrage prompted by the attack on Pearl Harbor, which came while some of our highest military leaders were assuring the nation that the Japanese - not directly called "inferior," but so assumed - were incapable of mastering such a logistic and tactical feat.

Such was the premise of Avery Brundage, the long-serving Chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee who later became President of the International Olympic Committee. The title of a 1955 article by him was a grudging "I Must Admit Russian Athletes Are Great."