Russia and the 2018 Fifa World Cup by Richard Arnold

Author:Richard Arnold [Arnold, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000357592
Goodreads: 55474809
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

Sport in Russia versus sport in the Soviet Union

Sports policy is therefore one social activity, which the regime is taking very seriously and promoting. The positive social externalities of sport make this a positive social good for Russian citizens. In an earlier paper, Arnold (2018) found that the Russian regime was reviving some Soviet-era institutions and social practices to promote sport. What are the principal similarities and differences between Soviet and Russian sporting practices? How was sport used in late Communism and how does this compare to the contemporary era? This section argues that in two ways, sport in Russia resembles sport in the Soviet Union but that there is one significant difference. Taken together, these points do suggest a Putinist approach to sport similar to that of Italian fascism and not (though many like to make the alarming comparison) to German fascism.

First, sport was famously one of the principle mechanisms through which the United States and the Soviet Union waged the Cold War. Nuclear weapons having made the idea of conventional war between the superpowers too awful for rational beings to contemplate, it was in sporting arenas that the rivalry between Communism and Capitalism was to play out. The meaning and memory of the “miracle on ice” in the 1980 Winter Olympics—in which the United States defeated the Soviet Union in an ice hockey match—is testimony to the significance of such rivalry. Indeed, symbolism turned every international competition into a contest of “our way of life against theirs” (Soares, 2014) and even within alliances, sporting relationships bore a curious resemblance to political ones. Riordan (1991) writes that community programs to encourage sporting elites expanded in the Soviet Union in the 1950s just as the “cultural Cold War” was heating up.

Not that this meant, however, solely a focus on cultivating elite sport. One of the main aims of sports policy in the Soviet Union was to create a generation of athletes who might compete with those from the West and win glory for the country. According to Howell (1975: 142), one of the principal festivals in the late Soviet period was the union-wide Spartakaids,

which have been staged since 1956, each four years in the year preceding the Olympic Games. The competitions in the first stage of the games, which is considered the “grass-roots” level, are open to all and hence, at the fourth Spartakaid in 1967, eighty million participated. Competitors gradually advanced upwards through city, district, and republican level competitions to the finals in which, in 1967, there were 16,138. These finals serve as one of the means of selecting the best athletes for international competitions. However, the main purpose of these Spartakaids is to provide a public demonstration of friendship, youth, vitality, fitness and strength.

Although the image in the West might be that the Soviets cared only about training those athletes who would compete with their peers at the Olympics, the truth is that sport was readily available to the Soviet masses (the principle of massovnost’). This provided a

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