Action in the Era of Stagnation

Abstract

After the Soviet Union’s successful second-place result in the 1952 Olympic Summer Games, its sports officials began to dream of hosting the great mega-event in Moscow. Able leaders like Konstantin Andrianov and Nikolai Romanov repeatedly pushed the party leadership to go along with their plans but to no avail. Joseph Stalin, who departed the world in 1953, had little interest in sport, and his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was hostile. Everything changed when Leonid Brezhnev came to power. He was an ardent fan of sport who had supported teams and clubs in all the localities through which he passed on the way to the top of the Soviet hierarchy in 1964. Ten years later, after numerous false starts, the Soviet capital was awarded the Games. In this case, a single individual in an authoritarian state had a profound effect.