Soviet Sport and Transnational Mass Culture in the 1930s

Abstract

As an international system of competitive, achievement-oriented sport developed into one of the interwar period's most potent carriers of transnational mass culture, the Soviet Union initially chose not to participate. Ideologically hostile toward capitalist internationalism and suspicious of international cultural influences, the Soviet regime instead attempted to create an alternative international system of `proletarian sport' that eschewed record-seeking and individualism. In the 1930s, however, the political benefits of participation in `capitalist' sport (including the opportunity to influence foreign public opinion and to project images of national power) drew the Soviet Union into participation. Although `capitalist' sport was modified in the Soviet context, a reciprocal `sportification' of Soviet physical culture also occurred, as the process of cultural transfer embedded the Soviet Union in transnational cultural flows that sometimes served to subvert Soviet ideology.