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Euphoria and Exhaustion

Modern Sport in Soviet Culture and Society

Erschienen am 04.10.2010, 1. Auflage 2010
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Bibliografische Daten
ISBN/EAN: 9783593392905
Sprache: Englisch
Umfang: 363 S.
Format (T/L/B): 2.5 x 21.3 x 14 cm
Einband: Paperback

Beschreibung

The architects of the Soviet Union intended not merely to remake their society-they also had an ambitious plan to remake the citizenry physically, with the goal of perfecting the socialist ideal of man. As Euphoria and Exhaustion shows, the Soviet leadership used sports as one of the primary arenas in which to deploy and test their efforts to mechanize and perfect the human body, drawing on knowledge from physiology, biology, medicine, and hygiene. At the same time, however, such efforts, like any form of social control, could easily lead to discontent-and thus, the editors show, a study of changes in public attitude towards sports can offer insight into overall levels of integration, dissatisfaction and social exhaustion in the Soviet Union.

Autorenportrait

Nikolaus Katzer ist Professor für Osteuropäische Geschichte an der Helmut-Schmidt- Universität Hamburg und Direktor des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Moskau. Sandra Budy, Alexandra Köhring und Manfred Zeller sind Mitarbeiter im DFGProjekt "Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte der Körperkultur und des Sports in der Sowjetunion".

Leseprobe

Sites and Media: Introduction Mike OMahony In October 1920, at the Third All-Union Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, the role that sport and physical culture should play in the newly established Soviet state was enshrined in an official declaration: The physical culture of the younger generation is an essential element in the overall system of communist upbringing of young people, aimed at creating harmoniously developed human beings, creative citizens of communist society. More pragmatically, the declaration continued to outline two practical goals that the development of sport should work towards: (1) preparing young people for work; and (2) preparing them for military defence of Soviet power. Just over two decades later, as men and women from through-out the Soviet Union exchanged their sports outfits for military garb and marched, sometimes straight from sports parades, to the military front to defend the nation from Nazi invasion, few citizens were in any doubt regarding the officially approved associations between sport, labor and military training. As one military leader argued in an article published in the journal Fizkultura i sport in 1941, the conflict would provide both the culmination and ultimate testing ground for this policy. Yet, it should be noted, this idealistic vision of the value of sport for society was one that was not necessarily shared by all participants in and spectators of, sport. The widespread notion that the growth of sport in the Soviet Union might simply be read as little more than a means by which the state coerced the masses to serve its needs, has proven to be a pervasive one, especially during the Cold War period. Here, Soviet successes in international sport, most notably at the Olympic Games, served further to shape Western interpretations of the Soviet states official attitudes towards sport as a social practice. However, as many of the essays in this section reveal, the transformations that Russian and Soviet sport underwent, particularly during the period from the late Tsarist era up to the Second World War, were in fact far more diverse, complex and nuanced than the model of the great Soviet sports machine might suggest. Indeed, as many historians of Soviet sport have shown in recent years, sport during this period might best be regarded, perhaps appropriately enough, as a contested arena, rather than simply as one of totalitarian command. For whilst the authorities, as the notional producers of sport, may well have aspired to promote sporting activities for the objectives proposed above, the public at large, frequently consumed sport in a manner that did not necessarily fulfil these aspirations. Thus, whilst the authorities valued sport as a means, variously to strengthen the organism and develop specific and pragmatic physical skills and regarded sports spectatorship as a means to educate and enhance a notion of collectivity, for the public, sporting activity could equally serve as a vehicle for personal physical expression and competition for competitions sake, whilst spectatorship frequently manifested itself in the form of a fan culture where team loyalty was based on a desire to celebrate heroes or be part of a smaller, more exclusive counterculture. Put more simply, whilst the state promoted sport as a social duty, it could equally be engaged with as a personal and pleasurable distraction and even a form of passive resistance. Inevitably, many of the key debates about sport were conducted amongst high ranking officials and members of state-sanctioned sports organizations. However, these debates also filtered out into a broader public arena, not least in the pages of the national and sports press, thus generating a widespread public discourse on sport. Thus, to gain a broader understanding of what sport may have signified to the public at large, a wider set of research resources needs to be examined. Visual culture, in its broadest sense, provides one such set of resources. Each of the essays in this section recognizes and highlights the ambiguous nature of sport. More importantly, they cast light on the various ways in which visual representation, whether in the form of photographs (both public and private), architectural plans, paintings and sculpture, contributed to this wider discourse concerning the potential of sport to be an agent of transformation within society as a whole. Beginning in the pre-revolutionary era, Ekaterina Emeliantseva examines the social topography of sport in St. Petersburg during the latter period of Tsarist rule. By analyzing contemporary photographs of the physical spaces inhabited by the burgeoning sports clubs and organizationsfrom the elitist exclusivity of the St. Petersburg Rowing Club to the one ruble spectator spaces of the citys hippodromesEmeliantseva reveals how these visual representations of key sports sites contributed towards, or resisted, the kind of social interaction and intermingling that was an integral aspect of the urbanization and industrialization of the imperial capital at the turn of the century and thus played a vital role in the construction of a new social geography. Sandra Budys analysis of photographs of sport in the popular and specialist press and in public exhibitions during the 1920s and 1930s usefully charts the ways in which changing political agendas can be traced in the shifting emphases of sports photography and photojournalism. Whether focusing on the athlete in action, portraits of individual sporting heroes or the anonymous collective of sportsmen and women at the infamous sports parades of the Stalin era, these images amply articulate and negotiate the shifting debates and concerns of the early Soviet period. Adopting a different starting position, Alexandra Köhrings essay offers a detailed account of the various manifestations of the project for the planned, but never completed, International Red Stadium. By comparing and contrasting the concepts and ideological underpinnings of the numerous proposals put forward by architects and social theoreticians throughout the 1920s, Köhring highlights the diverging notions of both sports participation and spectatorship for the new Soviet regime and how these tensions informed architectural ambitions. As she argues, the disparate proposals implied different hierarchies in the interaction of body and space and suggest radically different notions of how sport and the physical and metaphorical spaces it occupies might best serve a public that itself was regarded as undergoing a process of transformation into new citizens. Burcu Dogramacis contribution to this section shifts attention away from the Soviet Union to the new Turkish Republic established under Kemal Atatürk during the 1920s. As Dogromaci argues, the promotion of sport within the new state signified a political and social paradigm shift placing a strong emphasis on youth, body culture and an affinity with Western modernity. Here, the influence of western figures, including the German sports administrator Carl Diem and the Italian stadium architect Paolo Vietti-Violi helped to establish this new culture whilst the powerful photographs of the Austrian, Othmar Pferschy, later to become an official state photographer for Kemalist Turkey, reinforced this new emphasis by providing a modern vision of the sporting body as a metaphor for Turkish independence. For Bettina Jungen, the intersections between the Foucaultian concept of discipline and the practices of sport and dance are explored in the representation of such concepts in the medium of sculpture. Here a celebration of the physical control and effortless execution of the body in motion is linked to both the educational and transformational capacities of dance as a sportive activity. Focusing on key sculptural works by Vera Mukhina and Elena Ianson- Maniz...

Inhalt

Content Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Nikolaus Katzer I. Sites and Media Sites and Media: Introduction . . . 15 Mike O¿Mahony Sports Visions and Sports Places: The Social Topography of Sport in Late Imperial St. Petersburg and its Representation in Contemporary Photography (1890-1914). . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Ekaterina Emeliantseva Exploring the Power of the Curve: Projects for an International Red Stadium in 1920s Moscow. . . . . . 41 Alexandra Köhring Frozen Action: Thoughts on Sport, Discipline and the Arts in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. . . 61 Bettina Jungen Changing Images of Sport in the Early Soviet Press . . 71 Sandra Budy The Swimming Vtorova Sisters: The Representation and Experience of Sport in the 1930s. . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Christina Kiaer Heading into Modernity: Sporting Culture, Architecture and Photography in the Early Turkish Republic . . .111 Burcu Dogramaci II. Milieus and Memory Milieus and Memory: Introduction. . . 127 Louise McReynolds Imperial Careers and National Recollection: Baltic Wrestlers and the Organization of National Sports in the Late Tsarist Empire (using the example of Estonia). . . 133 Karsten Brüggemann An Academic Escape to the Periphery? The Social and Cultural Milieu of Soviet Mountaineering from the 1920s to the 1960s . . . . . . 159 Eva Maurer Beyond the Death Match: Sport under German Occupation between Repression and Integration, 1941-1944. . 179 Volodymyr Ginda ''The Second Stalingrada¿: Soccer Fandom, Popular Memory and the Legacy of the Stalinist Past. . . 201 Manfred Zeller Romantic Underdogs: Spartak in the Golden Age of Soviet Soccer, 1945-1952. . . 225 Robert Edelman III. Gender and Science Gender and Science: Introduction. . . . . . . . . . 247 Irina Bykhovskaya Emancipation within the Ruling Ideology: Soviet Women in Fizkul¿tura and Sport in the 1920s and 1930s . . 251 Kateryna Kobchenko Training Methods and Soccer Tactics in the Late Soviet Union: Rational Systems of Bodies and Space . . . . . . . 269 Hans-Joachim Braun, Nikolaus Katzer Soviet Women in Sports in the Brezhnev Years: The Female Body and Soviet Modernism. . . . . . 295 Anke Hilbrenner ''... if Jarmila Kratochvilova is the future of women¿s sports, I¿m not sure I¿m ready for it.a¿ Media, Gender and the Cold War . . . . . 315 Stefan Wiederkehr Epilogue Sport, Sport, Sport, or a Cinematic Experiment with the a¿¿Formula of Harmony¿. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339 Christine Gölz Supplement Sports trousers 1928. . . . . . . . . 363