Abstract
Since Greco-Roman antiquity, the convergence of sports and politics has been a constitutive feature of political cultures. More recently, the blending of sports and politics has been revived with racist understanding by twentieth century totalitarian regimes and has remained a central promotion tool for far-right movements across the world. Due to the multiple fractures that have erupted in Ukrainian society since the Maidan Revolution and the war in Donbas, sport has become instrumental for Ukrainian ultranationalist movements. Through their direct involvement in youth sports education, Azov’s National Corps Party and the Sokil movement seek to foster a mythified Ukrainian national revival exalting physical virtue and patriotic spirit. This article discusses how sport is used by the Ukrainian far right as a Gramscist strategy to channel dialogue with authorities, to indoctrinate youth with militaristic nationalism, and to spread a fascist-minded cult of the masculine body.
Highlights
Since Greco-Roman antiquity, the convergence of sports and politics has been a constitutive feature of political cultures
The blending of sports and politics has been revived with racist understanding by twentieth century totalitarian regimes and has remained a central promotion tool for far-right movements across the world
Due to the multiple fractures that have erupted in Ukrainian society since the Maidan Revolution and the war in Donbas, sport has become instrumental for Ukrainian ultranationalist movements
Summary
Like any other aspiring-totalitarian movement, Ukrainian ultranationalist organizations see sport as the most alluring way to gather support from youth. Youth League”: How children from various parts of the country competed in Kyiv], National Corps YouTube Channel, September 17, 2017, accessed May 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3lJRyS5wZ4. In addition to the fact that the instruction dispensed there is homogenous insofar as all participants are “placed in the same situation, cut off from the outside world for a relatively long time,”[63] the camps qualify as totalitarian because they enable direct control over the children by highlevel members of the movement’s hierarchy By means of these political and military rites, the individual completely surrenders to the movement, both physically and spiritually.[64] The repercussions of this kind of sporting and paramilitary training are still difficult to quantify by researchers and to assess by child psychologists, as it is arduous to make direct contact with the children. It should be assumed that Ukrainian far-right movements hope that this training will lead to much more political involvement by participants
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