‘Society Is Watching You Very Carefully’: Smuggling, the State and Athlete Attempts to Assert Agency in People's Poland

Abstract

This article focuses on the most renowned smuggling case concerning Polish athletes during the Polish People's Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa; PRL). In the early 1970s, several Polish football and basketball players were caught smuggling dollars out of Poland and importing gold into the country for profit. The article discusses the roles states devised for athletes in the countries of real socialism and how athletes attempted to assert agency within these confines. It draws on work by Robert Edelman and Sylvain Dufraisse to show how athletes often did not behave in the way Eastern bloc states wished them to.