Sport and Modernity in 20th-Century Russia

Abstract

The article by a well-known German researcher of Soviet sports is devoted to the problem of the structural interconnection between the corporeal practices of modernity (i. e., sports) with its novel social conditions. First, it considers the theoretical and historical aspects of the creation of a sporting culture process in the everyday life of modernity. It then refers to the normative dimensions of a new sport-oriented body formed within the framework of everyday formal and informal cultural practices. In the third section of the work, the researcher’s attention is focused on the spatial dimension of mass sporting activity in the USSR. The fourth section analyzes the parallel development of Soviet sports and the mass media which provided effective channels for promoting desired corporeal images. A special section of the paper is devoted to a football game. It particularly demonstrates the initially-ambivalent attitude of the Communist authorities towards this most popular of team play, which turned out to be at the center of a bitter political dispute during the early Soviet years. The article highlights the peculiar properties of football which made it the most popular sports activity. The article also discusses the question of the structural interrelation between physical culture and the Soviet system, which is key to understanding the extraordinary international success of socialist sports in the post-Stalinist period. The final part discusses the combination of the innovative and the archaic elements in the Russian version of modernization at the beginning of the 20th century, which limits the semantic applicability of the term “modern” in relation to empirical research. The article concludes with the author’s call to intensify the study of particular disciplines and other forms of organization wherein the phenomenon of global sports finds its historical realization with regard to its peculiar national framework.