A timeline of Soviet Olympic history

'If you want to be like me, just train!'  1951 poster promoting the basic physical training system in the Soviet Union.  The man in the picture has the coat of arms of the Soviet Union on his top, indicating he competes at international level.  Picture courtesy of A Soviet Poster A Day

Jim Riordan published his article, 'The Rise and Fall of Soviet Olympic Champions', in 1993.   In 1992 the Soviet Union, under the aegis of the Commonwealth of Independent States, had made its last hoorah at the Olympic Games.  The Barcelona Olympics had also marked the 40th anniversary of the Soviet Union's participation in their first Games, at Helsinki in 1952.  Soviet men and women had dominated the artistic gymnastics competitions at both.

In the following timeline I extract from Riordan's article key points leading to the accession of the Soviet Union to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1951.  It makes for fascinating reading, addressing such key themes as

• State involvement in sport
• Reward and reprisal for sporting success
• Relations between East and West
• Sport as a diplomatic tool, and weapon
• Olympic values; amateurism and professionalism

In the forty years since1952 sport had changed significantly.  The Soviet Union's state support for its athletes was considered to go against the Olympic spirit of amateur effort and participation, and key political figures had opposed their accession to the IOC on these grounds.  Yet by 1992 the Olympic rings had become a powerful commercial symbol, and sports sponsorship a major source of income for both sporting bodies and the highest profile athletes.  By 2012 commercial renumeration for athletes and sporting bodies has become at least as common as state renumeration worldwide.  Russian Gymnastics is supported significantly by VTB Bank (President of the Russian Gymnastics Federation, Andrei Kostin, is also Chairman of the VTB Management Board) and the country's sports policy goes hand in hand with youth and tourism as the country invests heavily in sporting infrastructure and facilities for such events as the 2014 Winter Olympic Games and the 2018 Football World Cup.

Much of the meat of what happened during the years covered by the timeline (1894-1951, with an emphasis on the post-War years between 1947 and 1951) is still - just - within living memory.  The current leadership of the Russian gymnastics team are too young to have been directly involved in the key events, but the scarring is deep and reaches well beyond Moscow.  The Russian sense of paranoia at every poor competition outcome (eg Valentina Rodionenko's recent declaration that 'The Judges Scare Us') mirrors earlier state concerns that Soviet defeats might be taken as a slur on the national character and used as an opportunity to 'fling mud at the whole nation' (Romanov, 1987, cited by Riordan, 1993: 26).  The distant memory of the execution of two leading sports figures in the 1950s following poor performance at international competitions can't help the inclination to take things hard.  In the wider context of Stalin's purges which touched almost every family in the Soviet Union, such events become common memory and shared depression.

The West's suspicion of Russia also finds at least some explanation here: Riordan mentions demands made on sporting federations in the 1940s and 1950s: for Russian to be accepted as an official language, for the inclusion of Soviet members of executive committees.  It was 1976 before Soviet Yuri Titov became President of the FIG (neutral Switzerland held the President's seat up until that time) but by then Russian had become the principal language of the sport in which the Code of Points was drafted.  Much of the intellectual capital in the sport resided in the Soviet Union, and its dominance of the sport during the 60s, 70s and 80s will be forever recorded thanks to the naming of skills after those gymnasts first to perform them.

One of the first things that happened in 1993 was that a new Code of Points was published - in English.  Rumour has it that a good Russian language translation only became available weeks before the April World Championships, leaving many gymnasts with pitifully little time to prepare new routines.  Russian has only recently been reinstated as an official language of the FIG, but by now Russia has lost the initiative thanks to the migration of so many of its leading lights to overseas programmes, and the resulting dissipation of the coaching and research effort as coaches compete rather than collaborate.  Inept editing of the various versions of the Code of Points has led to at least one significant marking debacle, at the 2010 World Championships.  The sporting political compass has swung in the Americans' favour as a simplistic Code of Points reflects their strengths and minimises the impact of their weaknesses.

I wonder what Russia will do next, will they be able to reclaim the initiative?

Since Riordan's article was written, East has shifted West, and much of Russia is perceived as European.  When we speak of the 'East' today we generally mean China and Asia, but Riordan's references to 'the East' mean most of the Eastern bloc countries, including amongst others Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany, Poland as well as the Soviet Union.  Do not forget that the Soviet Union embraced a monster collection of now independent states who today compete in gymnastics under their own flags, including Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia and Estonia as well as Russia.  Remember that Riordan's points are about sporting policy at a national and international level, whereas in competition the individuals represent themselves and their sport; for all the political manipulations going on East and West athletes and coaches are engrossed in their work, and policy becomes secondary if not invisible.

I am researching a number of issues to which his article pertains, but wanted to focus on a chronicle of Soviet Olympic history.  This seems particularly timely given the upcoming Olympic Games and you can often only consider the present and future by understanding the past.

This blog post is work in progress.  I very much welcome comments.

1894	Russia was one of the dozen founding members of the modern Olympic movement.
1908	Russian team competed at the Olympics
1911	Russian National Olympic Committee came into being
1912	Russian team competed at the Olympics
1917	The Russian Revolution.  Russian leadership ignored ‘bourgeois’ sports organisations and competitions.   The Olympic Games were considered to ‘deflect workers from the class struggle and to train them for new imperialist wars’.
1920s	Pressure against competitive sports continues; anti Olympic feeling as the sports embraced were considered to reflect ‘the social distinctions and privileges current in Western society’. During this time, there was an emphasis on ‘worker sports organisations’.  This reflected a feeling that Russia was poorly connected and of little influence on the international scene.  Policy was being led by Communist International (or Comintern) and the subsidiary body, Red Sport International
1932-1936	The USSR snubs the IOC by organising parallel Worker Games and declining to participate in the Olympics
1939-1945	World War II results in an altered balance of power in Europe, with ten Soviet-aligned states emerging between 1945 and 1949.  This rebalancing lies at the root of the ensuing Cold War between West and East that shaped international politics for many years, and provided the basis for new thinking about the importance of sport as a theatre of international competition and a platform to demonstrate ideological superiority. Simultaneously, domestic sport in the USSR was developing, and beginning to be considered strong enough to win in international competition, thus demonstrating the ‘vitality’ of the Soviet system.
1947	Soviet sports recognise the need to join international federations and comply with international sporting rules, thus leading to a favouring of medals and badges as reward, rather than financial remuneration. Within the IOC leadership certain prominent figures (J Sigfrid Edstrom (President of the IOC), Avery Brundage (Edstrom’s successor as President of the IOC) and Colonel P W Scharroo) feel hostile towards, and suspicious of the USSR on grounds of the state involvement in the training of its athletes (‘the government uses sport to increase the military and economic strength of the Russians’, reported Scharroo in November 1947).  Athletes and officials were seen only as ‘pawns’ of the state, unable to be free and independent and ‘only numbers in the state’.  Furthermore, the national federations were unable to conform to the amateur spirit of the IOC: athletes were essentially full time employees of the state, receiving bonuses for setting records and winning victories against overseas rivals.  Worse, they were subject to severe reprisals for failures.  While some might treat the latter statement with some doubt, the memoirs of Sports Minister Nikolai Romanov suggest otherwise (see the quote from his memoirs, below).
1948	Amid rumours that the USSR had been invited by the IOC to join the Olympic Games, there is, within the USSR, mounting opposition to Olympism on the grounds of the movement’s ‘bourgeois’ background, and doubts as to whether the Soviet Union could mount an effective sporting challenge on an international level.  Any discussion or dissent is discouraged by a purge of those holding opposing opinions; student athletes of the Stalin Institute of Physical Culture and the Army Physical Training College were expelled.  Many Jewish sporting figures – academics and medics – were arrested and accused of ‘anti-patriotic’ deviations.  Finally, the Soviet government denounced the IOC.  The Soviet Union did not compete at the 1948 Olympics and a ‘worker Olympics’ to include all the states of Eastern Europe was proposed. The defeat of the Soviet speed skaters in the European Championship led to the sacking of sports minister Romanov and his replacement by former security force deputy chief Apollonov.  Riordan speculates that this was at least partly to ‘put the fear of God’ into athletes and coaches. The Soviet Union sends a small group of observers to the 1948 London Olympic Games, in order to assess the likelihood of securing victories in 1952.
1949	Communist Party resolution on sport decreed that all sports committees were ‘to spread sport to every corner of the land, to raise the level of skill and, on that basis, to help Soviet athletes win world supremacy in major sports in the immediate future’  (Novikov, 1949, cited by Riordan, 1993: 26) The foundations of Soviet sports are laid, including the creation of sports schools, and the Soviet Union sports federations now joined the majority of the major international sporting federations and began to take part in international sport.  Parallel developments are taking place in the West, who recognise the value of friendship and communication relations with the USSR.   We see a significant hardening in the USSR attitude to sporting participation.  Nikolai Romanov, chair of the Government Committee on Culture and Sport, records in his memoirs (1987, cited by Riordan, 1993: 26) : ‘… we were forced to guarantee victory, otherwise the ‘free’ bourgeois press would fling mud at the whole nation as well as our athletes … to gain permission to go to international tournaments I had to send a special note to Stalin guaranteeing the victory.’ By late 1949, the Soviet leadership had reconciled itself to the idea of participating in the 1952 Helsinki Games.  They reassured a disquieted IOC leadership, concerned that state support for the Soviet Union’s athletes amounted to professionalism and a breach of the Olympic spirit, that athletes could qualify for the Games under Olympic rules.  Brundage said : ‘if we conform to fundamental Olympic principles and follow our rules and regulations we cannot possibly recognize any Communist Olympic committee’ (7th December 1950).
1950	Principals of the Stalin Institute of Physical Culture and the Army Physical Training College, S M Frumin and General Kalpus, were arrested, tried for spying and shot.
1951	The newly formed USSR Olympic Committee applies to the IOC for  admission and is accepted.  While membership of other sporting federations had been accompanied by specific demands, eg Russian be an official language, and a Soviet representative to join the Executive Committee, this membership request was made without condition. Riordan suggests that the the Soviet Union’s desire to join the IOC stemmed from wider macro political, and sporting issues.  Within the Soviet Union, (i) the decline of Stalin and his hold on policy, (ii) the lack of support for the ‘Worker Games’ from other states behind the Iron Curtain, and (iii) a softening in international policy and a desire for peaceful co-existence following the development of the Soviet Union’s own atomic forces all played a part.  On the sporting front, the strong likelihood of the country achieving victories also provided strong motivation The IOC’s about turn and acceptance of the Soviet Union into its membership seems to have been motivated by a desire to avoid a major political upheaval, especially in the wake of the acceptance of West Germany a year previously, despite strong protest from Great Britain.

References

Novikov, I (1949) ‘Bolshoi sport I vneshnyaya politika’ Kultura I zhizn¸ 11 January 1949

Riordan, J (1993) ‘The Rise and Fall of Soviet Olympic Champions’ Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies Vol II, 1993 pp 25-44

Romanov, N N (1987) Trudnye dorogi k Olimpu Moscow: Fizkultura i sport