The second week of the Rio Olympics is now in full swing with the track and field disciplines having taken over from the swimming events. The conspicuous media coverage of the ‘unofficial'(sic) medal tallies in these games and the keen, vicarious interest of patriotic supporters in the performances of their national teams is as high as ever. By way of contrast to today’s highly competitive and commercialised IOC Olympics, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at a very different kind of Olympiad, one lacking in individual competitiveness, centring largely round the Second World in the 1920s and 1930s.
During the interwar period (1919-1939) the newly-communist state of the USSR isolated itself from the capitalist world, this also meant opting out of the western system of sport, including the quadrennial Olympic Games♜. The USSR leaders viewed the Olympics as a capitalist and inherently exploitative and chauvinistic sporting event run by and for the West’s elites¹. The Bolsheviks certainly wanted to engage the Soviet citizenry especially its youth in physical activity, but wanted to create a sporting and physical culture that was ‘proletarian’ in nature to match the state’s avowed ideological position². Eschewing the IOC games’ ‘bourgeois’ individualism and record-seeking, the Soviets envisaged a sporting movement that would be class-based, collectivist and mass-oriented³.
Spartakiad 1931As an alternative to the Olympics the Soviet Union in the early 1920s introduced the Spartakiad⁴, an ongoing, international multi-sports event sponsored by itself. The state organisation responsible for organising the event was called Red Sport International♔ (RSI or Sportintern), under the aegis of the powerful Comintern (the Communist International). The Spartikiad was the brainchild of RSI’s first president, Nikolai Podvoisky who came to the position from being Vsevobuch (responsible for organising the military training of Soviet youth).
RSI was formed in opposition to the IOC’s First World-dominated Olympics, but also in opposition to the rival Socialist Workers’ Sport International (Ger: Sozialistische Arbeitersport Internationale, SASI) which was founded as the Lucerne Sport International and based in that German-speaking Swiss city in 1920 (see Postscript). SASI organised a series of Workers’ Olympiads over the ensuing two decades.
The early (unofficial) Spartakiads were purely Soviet Republic affairs involving formations of the Red Army and Spartak Youth Physical Culture. Later participants included trade unions, the Dynamo Physical Culture Sports Society, the Patriotic Defence Society (DOSAAF) and other labour-based sports clubs and associations. From 1928 to 1937 athletes from sports clubs and associations outside of the USSR were invited to take part in the Spartakiads.
RSI Vs SASI
Predictably the separate sports tournaments of the USSR-sponsored RSI and the SASI (backed by the German parliamentary socialist Left and a mixture of independent socialists, syndicalists and anarchists) became vehicles to endorse the virtues of each body’s political stance … the Soviets saw the sporting activities of RSI as opportunities for political education of the masses (although they were quite frustrated at the limited success in this objective). There were calls in the 1920s for SASI and RSI to unify their multi-sport movements and some tentative connections made, but these were made against a backdrop of the non-crystallisation of the Left in Europe. Communists and social democrats committed the fatal political mistake: bickering and fighting with each other rather than focusing on the common enemy, a greater threat to them from fascism and the Far Right in Europe (eg, as happened in Weimar Germany). Ultimately the two workers’ sporting organisations couldn’t bring themselves to merge as the ideological divide between moderate (democratic) Left and Far Left widened⁵.
Both sports internationals were large-scale organisations, each with over two million members by 1928. Both professed to be anti-bourgeois but crucial differences surfaced rapidly. SASI took a strongly anti-militarist stance (the Olympiad’s slogan was “No More War”), and insisted that members follow its policy of political party neutrality (on both counts antithetical to RSI). SASI’s political non-alignment drew hostility from RSI who attacked it for a failure to espouse revolutionary goals, labelling its members as ‘Mensheviks’ and ‘reformists’. RSI also pursued a strategy of trying to ‘white-ant’ SASI by forming communist factions within it. SASI for its part earnestly resisted attempts by RSI to radicalise its movement and impose a communist dominance over it⁶.
SASI held its first Workers’ Olympiad in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1925. Around 150,000 spectators attended and a world record was broken in the 4 x 100 metres women’s relay race. SASI fostered the ideals of international solidarity and brotherhood among athletes, this was in stark contrast to the IOC which had compromised its own Olympic principles by allowing Belgium and France to ban the defeated (so-called) “aggressor nations”, Germany and Austria, from the 1920 and 1924 Olympics♕. The display of national flags and anthems at Worker Olympiads were forbidden … all athletes competed under a single red flag and “The Internationale” was sung at ceremonies which comprised displays of free exercises by a mass of gymnasts. The sense of brotherhood engendered by SASI discouraged the quest for records and the idolisation of individual athletes⁷.
Another feature distinguishing the Workers’ Olympiad from the IOC Olympics was that the best performed athletes were awarded diplomas instead of medals. As well, there was no exclusive accommodation for competitors such as Olympic villages, worker-athletes were billeted with local, working class families⁸.
The 1931 SASI Olympiad in Vienna♚ was probably the most successful tournament, introducing innovative sports such as fitness biathlon (run-and-swim) and “military sport”. It attracted 250,000 spectators (more than attended the 1932 Los Angeles Games), with competitors from 26 countries numbering in excess of 75,000 (cf. a mere 1,410 competing at the LA Games). Workers’ Olympiads were not restricted to elite performers, they were in fact overtly non-elitist … open to participants regardless of ability. SASI’s games had a more socially progressive approach … where the IOC had only 107 women competitors in LA in 1932 (about 7% of the total), Vienna had 25,000 female athletes attend in 1931⁹.
The next Workers’ Olympiad was set to take place in Barcelona in 1936, the same year as the Berlin Olympics, and was intended to be a protest against the IOC’s awarding of the Games to Hitler’s Germany. It was however called off at the 11th hour owing to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (see separate post). Hastily rescheduled for 1937♤ in Antwerp, this Olympiad was considerably reduced in scale (15 participating countries) … no German athletes because the Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Federation of Germany (ATSB) had been outlawed by the Nazi regime upon coming to power. As a partial reconciliation SASI did permit RSI sporting clubs and bodies to take part. Exotic or novel sports at Antwerp included Basque pelota, Czech handball, table tennis, motor cycling and chess¹⁰.
Antwerp WO 1937The 1937 Workers’ Olympiad was the last of SASI’s sexennial multi-sports labour-centred events, as the outbreak of World War II put paid to plans to hold the 1943 Workers’ Olympiad scheduled to take place in Helsinki. The global war also called a halt to the Moscow-controlled Spartakiads (Red Star International itself was dissolved in the late 1930s).
Emerging from the war as allies of Britain, France and the US, the USSR moved towards a position of greater engagement with the world. Embracing the West, to the extent it did this, was partly a recognition of the need to modernise the Soviet Union, and this was essential if the USSR was going to compete with and overtake the capitalist world in industry, technology and agriculture. A key part of engaging internationally was to integrate into the Western international sports system, starting with the major sports in the USSR, football and weightlifting. The Soviets got themselves onto the world governing federations in these sports and then extended the process to other highly participatory sports¹¹.
As the muscle-flexing of the Cold War was starting up, the USSR recognised the value of using sport to project and enhance great-power status, so a clear aim was re-admission to the Olympic Games fraternity. The Soviets did not try to participate at the 1948 London Games but timed their return for the 1952 Games in Helsinki where they were successful in winning 22 gold medals. At Melbourne in the 1956 Olympics the USSR finished first (above even the mighty USA) in the medal tally. Such a demonstration of communist sporting supremacy over capitalist nations in this world arena brought the Soviet Union a real measure of international recognition¹² (in the same way as Soviet technological breakthroughs in the “Space Race” did).
In the post-war period the Soviet Union continued holding Spartakiads, but they now had new purposes. The Spartikiads and other such massive-scale, multi-sport extravaganzas (kompleksnye sorevnovania) were still PR vehicles to propagate positive values of youth, optimism and world peace. The Spartakiad continued right up to the breakup of the USSR, and its sporting activities bolstered national defence by providing paramilitary training for Soviet youth. But the event was now held one year prior to the Olympics, the Spartakiad became an internal Olympics trial, a mechanism to find and develop new talent for the upcoming Games¹³.
Postscript:
The origins of worker gymnastic and sporting associations and clubs lie in Central Europe in late I9th century and arose out of an increase in workers’ leisure time, eg, Germany led the way with the formation of the Worker-Gymnasts Association (Arbeiter-Turnerbund – ATB) in 1893. Swimming, sailing, athletics and other sports swiftly followed suit. By soon after the turn-of-the century these types of organisations had spread to other European states. In 1913 worker sport associations representing Germany, England, Belgium, France and Austria, met at a congress in Ghent and formed the first International Workers’ Sports Association. The advent of world war the following year however put the IWSA’s activities in abeyance for the duration¹⁴.
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♜ in this formative stage of the Soviet Union, “Socialism in One Country” was the prevailing strategy of the Party (advanced by Stalin) – consolidating the ‘progressive’ and revolutionary conditions within the USSR, which meant postponing its export to the outside world
♔ originally known as the International Red Sports and Gymnastics Associations, underscoring gymnastics’ place in organised recreational pursuits in this period
♕ both worker sports associations (especially SASI) railed against the IOC for its practice of social exclusion, racist attitudes and failure to promote policies of gender equality at the Games
♚ the same year RSI held an All-Unions Spartakiad in Berlin
♤ the 1937 Summer workers’ event was preceded by an Arbeiter Olympiade Winter in Czechoslovakia
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References:
¹ a succession of aristocratic heads of the IOC (de Coubertin, de Baillet-Latour, Brundage) accentuated the elitist nature of the organisation and the event
² more pragmatically, the government also understood that the proletarian sports meets would provide youth with valuable training for later national military service
³ B Keys, ‘Soviet Sport and Transnational Mass Culture in the 1930s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 38(3), 2003, www.blogs.bu.edu
⁴ the Spartakiad took its name from Spartacus, the 1st century Thracian gladiator who led the slave rebellion against Rome, a deliberate contrast with the Modern Olympics movement which took its inspiration from the Ancient Olympics with its aristocratic nod to the mythology of Greek Gods, ‘Spartakiad’, (Wikipedia), https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartakiad
⁵ ‘A Workers’ Olympics?’, Workers’ Liberty, 01-Aug 2012, www.workersliberty.org
⁶ DA Steinberg, ‘The Workers’ Sports Internationals 1920-28′, Journal of Contemporary History, 13(2), Apr 1978
⁷ B Kidd, ‘Radical Immigrants and the Workers’ Sports Federation of Canada, 1924-37′, in G Eisen & DK Wiggins [Eds], Ethnicity and Sport in North American History and Culture
⁸ ‘A Workers’ Olympics?’, op.cit.
⁹ ‘Socialist Workers’ Sport International’, (Wikipedia), https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ SocialistWorkersSportInternational; ‘Red Sport International’, (Wikipedia), https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedSportInternational; Kidd, op.cit.
¹⁰’1937 Workers’ Summer Olympiad’, (Wikipedia),https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 1937WorkersSummerInternational
¹¹ Keys, op.cit.
¹² ibid ; J Riordan, International Politics of Sport in the Twentieth Century
¹³ R Edelman, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sport in the USSR
¹⁴ G Kuhn, Playing as if the World Mattered: An Illustrated History of Activism in Sports