The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sports Bureaucracy, and the Cold War PDF Download
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Author: Jenifer Parks
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498541194
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
Using previously inaccessible archival documents, this study provides a longitudinal investigation of the middle levels of Soviet bureaucracy responsible for overseeing Olympic Sport during the Cold War. Spanning the period from the USSR’s Olympic debut in 1952 through the 1980 Games held in Moscow, this book argues that behind the high-profile performances of Soviet elite athletes, a legion of sports administrators worked within international sports organizations and the Soviet party-state to increase Soviet chances of success and make Soviet representatives a respected voice in international sports. Soviet officials helped expand the Olympic movement, increasing the participation of women, developing nations, and socialist bloc countries, while achieving Soviet political and diplomatic aims. Soviet representatives, over the course of only a few decades, became a dominant and respected voice within international sports circles, actively promoting Olympic ideals abroad even as they transformed those ideals to better align with Soviet goals. In the process, Soviet sports contributed to the evolution of Olympic sport, integrating the Soviet Union into an emerging global culture, and contributing to transformations within the Soviet Union. Back home in the USSR, the Sports Committee's leading personalities represented a new kind of Soviet bureaucrat, who emerged in the late years of Stalinism and contributed to the professionalization of party-state apparatus. Standing at the intersection between state and society, between Soviet political goals and their execution, and between Olympic sport and Communist ideology, mid-level Soviet sports administrators demonstrated ideological drive, political savvy, and professional pragmatism, providing the impetus, expertise, and experience to transform broad ideological constructs into specific policies and procedures in the Soviet Union and realize Soviet propaganda and foreign policy goals in international and Olympic sports.
Author: Jenifer Parks
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498541194
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231
Get Book Here
Book Description
Using previously inaccessible archival documents, this study provides a longitudinal investigation of the middle levels of Soviet bureaucracy responsible for overseeing Olympic Sport during the Cold War. Spanning the period from the USSR’s Olympic debut in 1952 through the 1980 Games held in Moscow, this book argues that behind the high-profile performances of Soviet elite athletes, a legion of sports administrators worked within international sports organizations and the Soviet party-state to increase Soviet chances of success and make Soviet representatives a respected voice in international sports. Soviet officials helped expand the Olympic movement, increasing the participation of women, developing nations, and socialist bloc countries, while achieving Soviet political and diplomatic aims. Soviet representatives, over the course of only a few decades, became a dominant and respected voice within international sports circles, actively promoting Olympic ideals abroad even as they transformed those ideals to better align with Soviet goals. In the process, Soviet sports contributed to the evolution of Olympic sport, integrating the Soviet Union into an emerging global culture, and contributing to transformations within the Soviet Union. Back home in the USSR, the Sports Committee's leading personalities represented a new kind of Soviet bureaucrat, who emerged in the late years of Stalinism and contributed to the professionalization of party-state apparatus. Standing at the intersection between state and society, between Soviet political goals and their execution, and between Olympic sport and Communist ideology, mid-level Soviet sports administrators demonstrated ideological drive, political savvy, and professional pragmatism, providing the impetus, expertise, and experience to transform broad ideological constructs into specific policies and procedures in the Soviet Union and realize Soviet propaganda and foreign policy goals in international and Olympic sports.
Author: Erin Elizabeth Redihan
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476627282
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
For Olympic athletes, fans and the media alike, the games bring out the best sport has to offer--unity, patriotism, friendly competition and the potential for stunning upsets. Yet wherever international competition occurs, politics are never far removed. Early in the Cold War, when all U.S.-Soviet interactions were treated as potential matters of life and death, each side tried to manipulate the International Olympic Committee. Despite the IOC's efforts to keep the games apolitical, they were quickly drawn into the superpowers' global struggle for supremacy, with medal counts the ultimate prize. Based on IOC, U.S. government and contemporary media sources, this book looks at six consecutive Olympiads to show how high the stakes became once the Soviets began competing in 1952, threatening America's athletic supremacy.
Author: Toby C Rider
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252098455
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
It is the early Cold War. The Soviet Union appears to be in irresistible ascendance and moves to exploit the Olympic Games as a vehicle for promoting international communism. In response, the United States conceives a subtle, far-reaching psychological warfare campaign to blunt the Soviet advance. Drawing on newly declassified materials and archives, Toby C. Rider chronicles how the U.S. government used the Olympics to promote democracy and its own policy aims during the tense early phase of the Cold War. Rider shows how the government, though constrained by traditions against interference in the Games, eluded detection by cooperating with private groups, including secretly funded émigré organizations bent on liberating their home countries from Soviet control. At the same time, the United States utilized Olympic host cities as launching pads for hyping the American economic and political system. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the government attempted clandestine manipulation of the International Olympic Committee. Rider also details the campaigns that sent propaganda materials around the globe as the United States mobilized culture in general, and sports in particular, to fight the communist threat. Deeply researched and boldly argued, Cold War Games recovers an essential chapter in Olympic and postwar history.
Author: Toby Charles Rider
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 421
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Book Description
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and its East European satellites used international sport as a diplomatic tool to convince the world that communism was a vibrant and superior political ideology. This study explores the U.S. government’s effort to counter the communist “sports offensive.” In particular, it is demonstrated that the U.S. government harnessed the Olympic Games as a platform to wage a propaganda campaign against communist sport during the early years of the Cold War. Based on declassified documents and a range of previously unexamined archival material, this dissertation argues that the United States responded to the expansive post-war challenge of Soviet sport earlier, and far more aggressively, than previously acknowledged by scholarly examination. The response was not a replication of the state-directed Soviet sports system, but instigated through covert psychological warfare operations and overt propaganda distributed to the “free world.” From 1950 to 1960, the U.S. government took an unprecedented interest in international sport and the Olympic Games. In the lead up to, and during each Olympic festival, the U.S. information program sent waves of propaganda material across the globe to promote the American way of life and, by the same token, to denounce communism. It used the Olympic host cities as venues for a range of propaganda drives to advertise the American economic and political system; it also attempted to manipulate the International Olympic Committee in clandestine ways. The most prevalent aspect of many of these initiatives was the government’s cooperation with private groups, some of which were secretly funded émigré organizations bent on “liberating” the regimes of Eastern Europe from communism. While all of these efforts to utilize sport may have been less extensive than those pursued by the Soviet Union, they do provide further insights into how the U.S. government mobilized culture to conduct the Cold War.
Author: Philip D’Agati
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137360259
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 123
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Book Description
The Soviet boycott of the 1984 Olympic Games is explained as the result of a complex series of events and policies that culminated in a strategic decision to not participate in Los Angeles. Using IR framework, D'Agati developes and argues for the concept of surrogate wars as an alternative means for conflict between states.
Author: Harry Blutstein
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147664523X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
The political tension of the Cold War bled into the Olympic Games when each side engaged in psychological warfare, exploiting sport for political ends. In Helsinki, the Soviet Union nearly overtook the United States in the medal count. Caught off guard, the U.S. hastened to respond, certain that the Soviets would use a victory at the next Olympics to broadcast their superiority over the Western world. Following the 1956 suppression of the Hungarian uprising, a Soviet athlete struck a Hungarian opponent in the Melbourne water polo semifinals, turning the pool red. The United States covertly encouraged Eastern Bloc athletes to defect, communist Chinese agents nearly succeeded in goading the Taiwanese government into withdrawing from the games, and a forbidden romance between an American and Czech athlete resulted in a politically complex marriage. This history describes those stories and more that resulted from the complicated relationship between Cold War politics and the Olympics.
Author: Lu Zhouxiang
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351181467
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
In the second half of the twentieth century, the Olympics played an important role in the politics of the Cold War and was part of the conflicts between the Capitalist Block, the Socialist Block and Third World countries. The Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO) is one of the best examples of the politicization of sport and the Olympics in the Cold War era. From the 1980s onward, the Olympics has facilitated communication and cooperation between nations in the post–Cold War era and contributed to the formation of a new world order. In August 2016, the Games of the XXXI Olympiad were held in Rio de Janeiro, making Brazil the first South American country to host the Summer Olympics. This was widely regarded as a new landmark event in the history of the modern Olympic movement. From the GANEFO to Rio, the Olympic Games have witnessed the shifting balance in international politics and world economy. This book aims at understanding the transformation of the Olympics over the past decades and tries to explain how the Olympic movement played its part in world politics, the world economy and international relations against the background of the rise of developing countries. The chapters in this book were published as a special issue in The International Journal of the History of Sport.
Author: Philippe Vonnard
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110526735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357
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Book Description
Sport during Cold War has recently begun to be studied in more depth. Some scholars have edited a book about the US and Soviet sport diplomacy and show ow the government of these two countries have used sport during this period, notably as a tool of "soft power" during the Olympic games. Our goal is to continue in this direction and to focus more on the sport field as a place of exchanges during the Cold War. Regarding this point, our aim is to show that there were events "beyond boycotts"many and that unknown connections existed inside sport. Morevoer, many actors were involved in these exchanges. Thus, it is important not only to focus on the action of States, but also on private actors (international sporting bodies and journalists), considering that they acted around sport (an "apolitic" field) as it was tool to maintain links between the two blocs. Our project offers a good opportunity for young scholars to present original research based on new materials (notably the use of institutional or personals archives). Morevoer, it is also a step forward with a view to conduct research within a global history paradigm, one that is still underused in sport academic fields.
Author: Rachel Maria Hutchison
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cold War
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Similar to the space race or nuclear arms race, Olympic competition was a battle between East and West in the Cold War. This thesis examines Soviet engagement in the 1952 Summer Olympics as a form of early Soviet cultural diplomacy and originally claims that Soviet propaganda portrayed the Cold War as a battle for peace. It also identifies the Soviet Union’s 1952 Olympic debut as a precursor to the Soviet Union’s engagement in international cultural diplomacy emerging in 1956. By analyzing publications of the Soviet press, this thesis argues that the Soviet Union aimed to prove the ideological supremacy of socialism not only through excellent athletic performances, but also by demonstrating the superior moral consciousness of Soviet athletes. To do so, the Soviet press applied its ‘peace offensive’ to sport and highlighted parallels between core tenants of Olympism and socialist ideology, such as egalitarianism and international friendship. Soviet newspapers lauded Soviet athletes as fierce defenders of the Olympic Games and invoked the memory of World War II to condemn the ‘capitalist perversion’ of sport by ‘warmongering’ Western nations—most commonly, these criticisms targeted the United States. The thesis then examines the depictions of individual Soviet athletes. Patriotic biographical sketches presented Soviet Olympians as hero athletes who exemplified the New Soviet Person. These inspirational depictions urged Soviet youth to pursue sport and mobilize for the battle for peace—that is, the Cold War. This research is increasingly relevant in 2022 following the Russian Federation’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as Russian media eerily presents a narrative of fascist aggression against Russian athletes.
Author: Kevin B. Witherspoon
Publisher:
ISBN: 1682260763
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
The Cold War was fought in every corner of society, including in the sport and entertainment industries. Recognizing the importance of culture in the battle for hearts and minds, the United States, like the Soviet Union, attempted to win the favor of citizens in nonaligned states through the soft power of sport. Athletes became de facto ambassadors of US interests, their wins and losses serving as emblems of broader efforts to shield American culture--both at home and abroad--against communism. In Defending the American Way of Life, leading sport historians present new perspectives on high-profile issues in this era of sport history alongside research drawn from previously untapped archival sources to highlight the ways that sports influenced and were influenced by Cold War politics. Surveying the significance of sports in Cold War America through lenses of race, gender, diplomacy, cultural infiltration, anti-communist hysteria, doping, state intervention, and more, this collection illustrates how this conflict remains relevant to US sporting institutions, organizations, and ideologies today.
