For a new and different perception of pivotal Soviet events, read on...

Big Bucks No!
Big Deal, Yes! and
Big Accomplishments too.

he reputation of the "big red sports machine" outran its realities. On the world stage Soviet sports propagandists took home most of the gold medals. The only area where sports-image makers lost points consistently at least in American eyes was for lack of smiles. Some thought smile-less Soviets signaled Pavlovian torture to produce phenomenal sport. Indeed, some souls may have been tortured. A lack of smiles from Soviet competitors was no different from the lack of smiles on Soviet streets; culturally conditioning. Sports, of course, could be used as a mirror or a mirror metaphor for society. In the case of Soviet society-at least as seen on television screens throughout the world---the mirror was of the fun house sort: distorting, exaggerating, and very different from the looking glass at home.  

In some ways, some days sporting events fulfilled similar functions as they do in the United States. For instance, in the small republics of the Caucasus and the Baltic States fans of a republic's football (soccer) or basketball team lavished special (nationalist) feelings on their local squad.In fact, a visit to a soccer match in Yerevan, Armenia or Vilnius, Lithuania especially one against a Moscow team was usually a good place to measure hostility to Russian's and Moscow's heavy hand. For men living in crowded, Ralph Kramden or worse kind apartments a trip to the stadium allowed a little drinking and a little bonding with a son or estranged brother or even brother-in-law. The sports machine did sometimes chew up its products and spit them out. It did produce people who knew every possible angle to be used in badminton and absolutely nothing else. It fostered show stopping performers of grace and new kinds athleticism, in spite of itself: witness Olga Korbut.

The wide world of Soviet Sports achieved amazing results on a comparatively slender resource base. A country devastated by Stalinist brutality, Hitler's armies, and a harsh climate competed against the most developed countries in the world on the international sports stage very successfully.

At the same time the country that put a priority on plans, controls, and mass culture carefully controlled from the top learned to live, to a degree at least, with a deep fear---the fear of spontaneity. Good sporting events contain moments of spontaneity; great sports happenings often hinge on the unexpected, the illogical, the romantic winning out over the rational. All this went against the conservative, predictability addicted preferences of those running the mature Soviet establishments.

Control freaks feared the outbreaks of emotions, not to mention drunken hooliganism that could erupt at a football (soccer) or hockey match. Yet these popular spectator sports provided one of the few "outs" in a Stalinist and post-Stalinist society where the state and its minions monitored culturally acceptable behavior. Simply put-boys behaving badly could get away with conduct unacceptable anywhere else. For a few hours in a stadium homo Sovieticus could enjoy a moment of release, a feeling a being slightly beyond the controls, almost a stranger in a strange land, Stalin-land. The earnest enlightenment and propagandizing characteristics of mass culture almost evaporated. Nikolai Starostin, a famous football (player) for a great team in the late 1930s and 1940s remembered that during that terrible time, "Football was separated from all that was taking place around it. It was in some way not under the authorities, a healthy thought for a generation of sinners....For the majority, football was the only, sometimes the last, possible hope for maintaining in one's soul some small piece of humane feeling and humanity."

Of course, it would be naïve to see sports in such a politicized country as apolitical. Sports and sportsmen as well as sportswomen were turned into tools to glorify the Stalinist state. Skills, fitness, keen reflexes help the collective effort to improve production and to foster military preparedness. The mania for stylized elaborate display, visible in Soviet films of the 1930s, the construction of parks dedicated to Soviet economic achievement, and large-scale everything (dams, new steel mills, skyscrapers) took over a simple event "physical culture day."

Sportsmen took over Red Square. The athletes performed over-rehearsed shows of skill. Naturally, they praised the greatest friend of Soviet physical culture. The participants sang the popular, "Sportsman's March" with a rousing chorus of "Physcultura [gymansitics] HURRAH-HURRAH!" They displayed how ready physical education made them for military execution of duty, if that became necessary. Right after the end of WWII Stalin honored the visiting Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower by inviting him and the American Ambassador, Averell Harriman to join the Soviet leadership atop Lenin's mausoleum to review one such display. Eisenhower, who had coached the football team at West Point, commented that it was a little scary that the women looked like they were in better shape for a fight than many plebes he had seen. Molotov told the Ambassador, "This is important because it develops the military spirit."

Almost as an aside the political leaders seemed to make a side deal about sports. Although if they really consciously thought about it, it scared them that a few mass spectator sports got by functioning the way Starostin described. International competition was another matter entirely-that was an ideological, propaganda, and pride issue-in another words a matter for the upper reaches of the party.

Men who thought in Marxist terms made a fundamental distinction between spontaneity and consciousness. The former was more elemental, uncontrolled, irrational and unpredictable. Comrades with minds trained in rational scientific ways of Marxist analysis were said to have 'developed consciousness.' Those in the 'vanguard of the proletariat' possessed consciousness. They needed to control the impulses and urges of less developed. The consciousness bearers in this case feared the more elemental side just as the small group of Bolsheviks who trampled the laws of history in 1917 feared the vast peasant and non-Bolshevik majority in the country they had come to rule. When the narrow strictures of rulings laid down by fiat were broken spontaneous actions could have fearful consequences. This was more than abstract theory-as many argued when training rules were relaxed for the Soviet-Canadian hockey series and the Russians dropped a lead and lost. It was not theory when KGB agents posed as trainers and athletes to make sure no spontaneous moments took place when top sportsmen went abroad.

The responsibilities of good conscious Communists kept the Soviet Union out of the Olympics for many years. When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 the Olympics was not exactly their cup of tea. An aristocratic cliche dominated it. They clung to a nobles and rich boy's notion of amateurs that excluded members of the working class because they did not have allowances or trust accounts large enough to let them train at leisure. No one was really expected to do work. The Bolshevik did not want anything to do with such anti-proletarian nonsense. But many liked the competition idea and Red Games, involving socialist sportsmen and women were organized around Europe and Russia. The Soviet sports establishment created its own Olympic-style contests, the Spartakiad, for international socialist competition. Some sports teams, football and track & field represented the Soviet Union in European meets after the war. The Soviet Union had been Allies with the US. They were cognizant of the propaganda value delivered by Jessie Owens against Hitler at the Berlin Olympics. Their sports programs had developed and deepened in the 1930's. According to America's preeminent expert on Soviet Sports, Robert Edelman some in the Soviet government had wanted to participate in the 1948 Olympics, but Stalin wanted the Minister of Sports to guarantee success. The Minister could not guarantee; the Soviets sent observers to the games.

The next Olympic Games took place conveniently in neighboring Helsinki, Finland. Soviet teams took a train across the border. They had arrived at the Olympics and never looked back. They stunned the world by their strong showing. The Soviet basketball team won the silver medal in this very American sport. In track and field they had a strong showing. Overall their first time out the Soviets showed themselves the equals of the United States. The amazing thing was they did so on a much shakier economic base than the country that emerged from WWII with its industry and economy intact.

The medals won in track and field were notable because those competitions made sense to 'scientific Marxist' way of thinking as Robert Edelman explains:

"The Russians and the Soviets refer to it as the queen of sports and it really is this wonderful, it's the most basic of all 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. The founders 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 improvement of human performance."

The idea of precise measurement made sports competition attractive to those who were used to seeing plans fulfilled in so many tons of concrete poured. Verifiability made for certainty; that was reassuring to Sports Committee personnel. Units of accomplishment made sense to the quantity (not quality) oriented mentality of Soviet bureaucrats. It did not hurt that there were lots of very specialized events in which narrowly focused sportsmen and woman could focus and win medals.

Sports flourished under state sponsorship, without commercialism, commercials or the obnoxious omnipresence of sports parents. The Soviet proclivity for kludge fixes, for husbanding resources, making something work may not have been obvious behind the Wizard of Oz façade of the 'Big Red Sports Machine' image. But it was that "can do" approach that stunned the world with so many Olympic victories, so early in Soviet Olympic experience. The humbleness of the facilities where Larissa Latynina made her mark in the typical resource poor provincial town of Kherson is much more akin to the poverty of Jim Thorpe's Oklahoma Indian School beginnings that Bill Bradley's athletic center at cushy Princeton. As a national heroine, she earned an Order of Lenin medal and a 23 square meter apartment.

Unlike sports programs determined by alumni funding priorities, the distribution of resources in the Soviet Union was more democratic-well in a strange sports field version of democracy (remember: fun-house mirrors). Ever sport was equal. If handball could win a gold medal, it received support. Each gold medal was as good as the next one. An obscure sport's medal was no less valuable than the medal in basketball. If weightlifting could earn medals---bang every class of weightlifter received some attention. Once they joined the Olympic movement, the Soviet sports bureaucracy reorganized the Spartakiads as a kind of internal Olympics that moved talented youngsters up from local events, to regional events, to a national Spartakiad. Early in life and at the lowest level kids were encouraged to take up one sport to do well at it in competitions. There were few equivalents of four sport lettermen.

Another aspect of the democratic support for athletes was the across the board devotion of resources to women's sports. A case could be made at least psychologically or psycho-politically that a Cold War push towards Title IX in America came from the embarrassingly strong showings Soviet women made. In all those Olympic competition that were interpreted in the mass media as surrogates for real war, Soviet women frequently entered every competition. The women won and brought home medals and glory. Simultaneously they delivered a not very subtle message about equality in sports to the US. For all kinds of sports the Soviet sports bureaucracy went on manhunts (actually boy and girl hunts). As in many aspects of its economy, the Soviet Union was blessed with a wealth of natural resources to exploit: in this case a big population. Talent scouts combed the country. The most promising got wisked away to a few centralized training centers-often far from a child's home.

The Soviet sports authorities conceived of this system to make the best of a bad situation vis-à-vis that of their rich rivals the Americans. As Robert Edelman explained:

"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. 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, ecologists, athletes, the whole thing. So really what you had is instead of this vast pyramid, through which were 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. 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."

The Soviet Encyclopedia Dictionary offers a brief definition of the Olympics. It lists the venues for the various games. It concludes, "from 1952 when the Soviet Union began to participate through the 1988 games [the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991] the Soviet Union won 340 gold, 288 silver, 250 bronze medals." The article says "see also Winter Olympics". And people should pay attention to those. The land of long winters did well there too. The story of hockey where the Soviets made rapid strides emphasizing great skating, elegant moves without the puck with a style stronger on physical conditioning than physical violence is almost a fairy tale-like success story.

To look at Soviet sports only in terms of medals or Olympics cements in place the Cold War stereotypes that gave sports broadcasters a dramatic script for their marathons of Olympic coverage. To step back away from the Cold War very American way of looking at things is useful. Our Northern neighbors the Canadians were hooked on their national sport, ice hockey, long before most Americans knew that icing was something other than a bad road condition, actually learned a lot by the way Russians came to play their game. Canadians appreciated the passion and the different way the Russians skated on the rink. Their rivalries promoted respect and understanding as equals. Russian skaters, before the destruction of the Soviet sports system allowed them to come west, drew respect not as products of a big red sports machine but as equals on the ice-some better, some a little worse, some able to improve. The same is true in the big arena of European football (soccer). European cup competitions conditioned most Europeans to see Soviet players as players. Their teams might have encountered special attention after, let us say the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. But as a whole, Soviet teams rotate through the regular cup play in Europe, the fans see them as just another team. Soviet soccer players are evaluated on their abilities, not as products of some machine-albeit a machine that by now is in ruins---not as surrogates for an evil empire that must be beaten in submission, but simply as players. Some play on a field of dreams; some may have grown up training in a nightmare; but what matters is how they do from when the game begins until it ends. Now, the ex-Soviet players face the same problems, glories, and hard choices that everyone else confronts. However difficult sport men and women of the former superpower must come to terms with their own pasts as well as plan for their new futures.