INTEGRATION OF PHYSICAL CULTURE AND SPORTS INTO THE SYSTEM OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE 1920-1930s

Abstract

The relevance of the chosen topic is due to the historiographical significance of the period of the first Soviet decades as a time when social and cultural practices were largely formed, which maintain their continuity, despite significant political and social changes in society. The purpose of this research is to analyze the process of integration of physical culture and sport in the Soviet higher education system in the 1920s and 1930s. It was aimed at identifying the main features of this process, including the specifics of the government's policy towards students as a special social group, determining the influence of state ideology on the decisions of the government in physical education and sports, and the role of physical education in the education of young people. Special historical methods were used in the preparation of the research: chronological, retrospective, com-parative-historical, narrative, historical-genetic, and typological. In accordance with the general principles of the methodology of historical sources studies, a systematization and selection of sources was carried out for the reconstruction of various aspects of the topic. It was important to turn to the methods of the methodology of new social history, in particular, historical anthropology, which made it possible to analyze social practices and everyday life, to conduct a multifaceted analysis of the phenomenon of mass sports. Physical culture was an integral part of the process of acculturation of the population, actively carried out by the Bolshevik government, and was intended to serve such goals as the spread of a healthy lifestyle, the militarization of society, gender equality, and the fight against “bourgeois remnants”. Physical culture was to become a truly mass daily practice for Soviet students, which required the establishment of a comprehensive propaganda work. At the same time, its full development was hindered by the lack of centralized management and insufficient funding. The turning point was in 1929, when the Council of people's Commissars issued a decree on mandatory teaching of physical culture in all universities and higher education institutions of the country. However, its implementation met with a lot of difficulties: the lack of sports facilities, organizational confusion, and lack of necessary human and financial resources. A qualitative leap in the solution of this issue, both in organizational and economic terms, was in the second half of the 1930s.