Cold War Olympics: A New Battlefront in Psychological Warfare 1948–1956

Abstract

For most scholars, the idea that politics and sports have always occupied separate spheres is an ahistorical fallacy. Although the refrain has been trumpeted by such high-placed figures as International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Avery Brundage, the notion has been roundly debunked by historians. Cold War Olympics: A New Battlefront in Psychological Warfare, 1948–1956 by Harry Blutstein adds yet another voice to this chorus. Blutstein demonstrates that international politics profoundly shaped the ways in which the Olympics were interpreted, organized, and consumed during the first decade of the Cold War. In essence, the games were transformed into an ideological battlefield. Athletes, officials, coaches, and journalists—all were expected to join the fight.Central to this combat in track cleats was the implementation of “psychological warfare,” an array of “nonlethal strategies” used by capitalist and communist nations alike “to win the hearts and minds of unaligned countries and to reassure allies and their own populace that they had the strength and determination to prevail” (1). Olympic defections represented some of the most coveted trophies. For the US and other capitalist countries, it was mostly about identifying and coaxing potential defectors, while Soviet-bloc nations aimed to prevent that from happening. In crisp, clear prose, Blutstein recounts the histories of several Olympic asylum seekers, including Czechoslovakian gymnastics official Marie Provazníková, who defected after the 1948 London Games; and the nearly three dozen Hungarian athletes, who, after the vicious quelling of the anti-communist insurgency in their native country, joined the celebrated Freedom Tour in America in early 1957 (some stayed in the US afterward; others did not). Of particular interest is Blutstein's discussion of three security operations—codenamed Griffin, Robin Redbreast, and Wren—undertaken by agents loosely affiliated with the American government and Australian authorities whose purpose was to woo and protect asylum seekers before, during, and after the 1956 Melbourne Games. “For Cold War warriors engaged in psychological warfare,” Blutstein contends, “high-profile defectors like Olympic athletes were high-caliber ammunition” (111).Propagandistic firepower also resulted from finishing atop the Olympic medal table. Victory at the games proved that one political-economic system was better than the other. Both superpowers participated in such ideological legerdemain. The Soviets were more blatant about it, directly attributing Olympic success to socialism. By contrast, the Americans rationalized defeat by complaining that, for example, communist Olympians were really professionals in disguise. Cold War Olympics considers other incidents freighted with political or propagandistic meaning, such as the visit by US athletes to the communist Olympic Village, aka “Sportsgrad,” during the 1952 Helsinki Games; the participation of the united German Olympic squad, which included athletes from both West and East Germany, in 1956; the violent Hungarian-USSR water polo game at the 1956 Melbourne Games; and the marriage of American hammer thrower Hal Connolly to Olga Fikitová, a discus thrower from Czechoslovakia, in 1957. Connolly and Fikitová had first met at the Olympics in Melbourne.As Blutstein notes in the preface, portions of Cold War Olympics initially appeared as a book in Australia. For the current version, Blutstein fleshed out some sections of the original publication. Large chunks of the book are based on research conducted in the National Archives of Australia, thus providing a viewpoint that has been underemphasized in Olympic historiography. The result is a work that is broad in scope yet sensitive to the human side of sport. In fact, one of the strengths of Cold War Olympics is Blutstein's ability to construct empathetic biographies of less-familiar but still important Olympic figures as Nikolai Romanov, head of the USSR's All-Union Committee of Physical Culture and Sport during the Soviet Union's initial foray into international athletics, and Hungarian water polo player Dezsö Gyarmarti. In addition, the nuanced analysis of events in Cold War Olympics foregrounds the finer points of history. For instance, readers learn that communist China's withdrawal from the Melbourne Olympics may have been caused in part by the subtle gamesmanship employed by the president of the Melbourne Organizing Committee, Wilfred Kent Hughes, who harbored a distaste for communism.Although Cold War Olympics discusses events in detail, there are a few notable omissions. For example, the presence of doping in the games is hardly mentioned, as is the administrative Cold War that played out within the IOC boardroom. Equally noticeable is the rather abrupt ending of the book. Blutstein would have been well served to expand the conclusion and maybe even include an epilogue in which central topics of the book—the marriage of Hal Connolly and Olga Fikitová, for example—could be projected out into the future, giving readers a sense of what became of the events. The admirable qualities of the book, though, far exceed its limitations. Blutstein's fine effort with Cold War Olympics should have sport scholars looking forward to his next publication.