Abstract
When authorities opened borders to free travel in the East bloc in the early 1970s, Czechoslovakia was an instant magnet to racing fans. Not only did the country boast top-notch tracks, it was close (and cheap) enough to host both professional racing teams and novices. Newspapers East and West waged bets on which team would lead the pack. Fans from the East and West flocked to otherwise quiet towns in the tens of thousands. Sinisterly, secret police from multiple countries also infiltrated fan clubs, keeping tabs on who met whom. More frequently than not, unruly campers unwittingly challenged the primacy of the state, driving drunk through villages, camping in people’s back yards, and destroying bars who refused service. In this contribution, I interpret the meaning of such international racing events. There is a large body of work on sports in socialism. This chapter argues that while such sporting events were used as a pressure valve to ensure an apolitical populace, the international nature of the racing events in Czechoslovakia had an added-on value. Socialist states spied on their citizens not only or primarily to ensure they were “behaving” while abroad but also–as was the case with Stasi agents to discover what citizens would do when they felt they were released from the eyes of the state. Unfortunately for the racing fans, such events were not an escape from the state, rather a new field of action to see how far “socialist internationalism” had progressed in the 1970s and 1980s.
Published Version
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