Abstract
The rich and competitive spirit of Soviet culture helped to drive many of the policies of the Soviet Union, including those involving their participation in international sports. The Soviet practice of utilizing international sporting events for political purposes helped to shape the history of sports in the Soviet Union, especially after World War II. Although it relates only peripherally to the main points of this book, it should be noted that the Russians were competing in the Olympics prior to World War I and the founding of the Soviet Union. They had made sporadic appearances in the Olympics from the early planning stages of revitalizing the Games through the Russian Revolution.
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Notes
Victor Peppard and James Riordan, Playing Politics: Soviet Sport Diplomacy to 1992 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1993), 61.
David Miller, Athens to Athens: The Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC, 1894–2004 (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Company, 2003), 476.
James Riordan, Sport in Soviet Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 405.
International Olympic Committee, Official Bulletin of the International Olympic Committee, 1931 (Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 1931), 5.
Norman N. Shneidman, The Soviet Road to Olympus: Theory and Practice of Soviet Physical Culture and Sport (Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1978), 24.
Alfred Senn, Power Politics and the Olympic Games (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1999), 85–86.
This acronym refers to the official French version of the USSR’s name: Union des Republiques Socialistes Sovietiques. S. Sobolev, “Letter to IOC, Moscow, April 1951,” Avery Brundage Collection, No. 149, USOA NOC, 1947–69, 2.
James Riordan, Sport under Communism (London: C. Hurst, 1981), 30.
Kommunisticheskaia, Twenty-Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1971), 293.
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, O Kulture Prosveshenii Nauki (Moscow: Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1963), 254–60,
as quoted in Barukh Hazan, Olympic Sports and Propaganda Games: Moscow 1980 (London: Transaction Books, 1982), 28–29.
Nikolai N. Romanov, Trudnye Dorogi K Olympu (Moscow: Fizkul’tura I Sport, 1987), quoted in Peppard and Riordan, Playing Politics, 57.
Pamphlet from the Information Department, Embassy of the USSR, Soviet Sport: The Way to Medals (Moscow: Novosti Press Agency, 1988), 16.
Boris Khavin, This is the USSR: Sports (Moscow: Novisti Press Agency, 1988). Some information was obtained directly from the sports federations. These included the federations for badminton, baseball, and softball. It should be noted that information was unavailable for some international sports federations. Therefore these numbers should be looked at as minimums and not the actual final total of international federations the Soviet Union joined during the specified time periods.
Aleksei Romanov, as quoted in Rob Beamish and Ian Ritchie, Fastest, Highest, Strongest: A Critique of High-Performance Sport (New York: Routledge, 2006), 37.
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© 2013 Philip D’Agati
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D’Agati, P. (2013). Soviet Sports History and the Olympic Movement. In: The Cold War and the 1984 Olympic Games. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137360250_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137360250_4
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