Shooting Over the Curtain—A Transnational Analysis of Soviet Hockey in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

This article analyzes Soviet hockey as a transnational phenomenon by underlining three international events that marked milestones in the domestication of hockey in the country and in the Sovietization of international hockey. Focusing on the period of the massification of the sport in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), from the end of the 1940s to the end of the 1960s, it interprets the appropriation and transformation of a Canadian sport in the Soviet reality through the analytical tools of cultural translation and hybridization. It is this period of great cultural and social transformation, first in the xenophobic context of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign that took place during late Stalinism, and later in the internationalist enthusiasm that characterized Khrushchev’s Thaw, that ice hockey has been sovietized. That process neccessitated the translation of a foreign cultural object in Soviet languages and semiotic tools. Meanwhile, international hockey itself underwent a profound hybridization process to which the Soviets greatly contributed.