Our future is our past - Soviet and Russian propaganda from 1950 to today

 As Russian state restrictions on the use of social media and the internet take hold in Russia, we are seeing changes in the way that fans all over the world can access information about gymnastics in Russia.   It is no longer easy for gymnasts to post their opinions, training updates and life events on social media because the State is blocking the use of social media, and even entire mobile internet networks, in certain parts of Russia.  You can read about this more broadly on BBC's Moscow correspondent, Steve Rosenberg's, channel on Youtube.

Russia’s attitude to sports is still very much focussed on elite sport, state involvement, and international competition.  Private gyms where anyone can participate are gradually opening, but gymnastics clubs, in the main, are still focussed on elite sport and training to compete at the top level. 

We need to go back a few years, to a time when Russia was part of a larger country, the Soviet Union.  

Early Soviet thought (during the 1920s and later) believed elite sports to be ‘bourgeois’.  Sport existed to prepare the entire population for war, and for labour.  The idea of preparing athletes to compete in international competition was strongly rejected, because it involved selecting individuals for special treatment. 

That all changed in the late 40s and early 1950s, when the Soviet Union decided to join the Olympic movement, and to compete in their first Olympics, 1952.

Sport, always promoted for its significant health benefits for individuals and communities, now became a phenomenon that could promote Soviet society both within the Soviet Union and outside of the country.  Propaganda posters hailed the health benefits of sport, but also showed imagery of victory for the great country.  It paraded a simple message to Soviet people that their way was the best; and it reinforced the idea of the population in general as somewhat voiceless, as children who must listen to their teacher, in this case the Soviet Government.  In other words, propaganda replaced freedom of information and spontaneous communication.

This approach dominated Soviet sports communications until more recent times, the 70s and 80s, when the Soviet press (supported by the state, and not without its own restrictions) would report on competitions and athletes in a fairly normal journalistic way, relatively speaking …  Photographic imagery of events would be available through national press agencies.  Specialist sports publications and books in the English language were published by state owned and run publishers such as eg Raduga.  In the UK, these were difficult to find, and to buy them involved a journey to London to a specialist Soviet bookshop in Charing Cross Road.

With the dismantling of the Soviet Union, things didn’t change that much in Russian sports communication.  But as we moved into the noughties, the wide availability of the internet and social media platforms changed all of this as Russian institutions, media companies and athletes learned how to communicate with the world in an informal and engaging manner. 

Russian gymnastics did this very well, posting across platforms for different purposes, from various sources and to different markets.  Their live streaming of competitions still remains one of the best and most widely available in the world.  Gaining an overall picture and attempting to analyse the sources – and understand their bias - involved a lot of work but this would be the same for any country, not least one with a long history of authoritarian rule.  As time passed, the availability of reasonable machine translations has also made this work easier.

Now, as Russia disappears from the internet, we are grateful to the RGF and to other individuals and collectives who still manage to provide information on gymnastics in Russia.  But we see that the communication channels and styles are more formal.  Some individuals – the team captains – have retained their internet rights and, through their agents in some cases, post helpful and informative materials that help us to feel how the teams and individuals are faring.  Vlogs and imagery, posted on Youtube, Vk.com and sometimes Instagram, give a feeling of warmth and remove the distance. 

We are lucky to have the RGF who post information very effectively, using eye catching posters that tell us what we are looking for.  I think it's likely that these methods are ones that are being counselled from the Government, and I expect that they involve a lot of work.  I don’t know if you could compare these to the propaganda posters used by the Soviet Union so long ago, but it does seem that Russia is slipping into a dark place at present - as one Russian has said, 'our future is our past'.  I hope not.