euphoria and exhaustion: modern sport in soviet culture and society
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This article was downloaded by: [Tufts University]On: 19 November 2014, At: 11:54Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
Sport in HistoryPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsih20
Euphoria and Exhaustion:Modern Sport in Soviet Cultureand SocietySusan Grant aa University College Dublin and University of TorontoPublished online: 10 Oct 2012.
To cite this article: Susan Grant (2012) Euphoria and Exhaustion: ModernSport in Soviet Culture and Society, Sport in History, 32:3, 457-460, DOI:10.1080/17460263.2012.725918
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17460263.2012.725918
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to its own devices, would have developed along the same commercial and
professional lines as soccer.
It is unfortunate that a review of a book of this quality must end on a
note of protest. This 178-page book retails for £48, a ridiculously
expensive price for a book that not only has huge value to academic
historians but would be immensely readable for anyone interested in the
history of rugby in Wales. Academic publishers now seem to think that
they have carte blanche to charge whatever they want, regardless of the
impact on the ability of the public to actually read the books they publish.
Unfortunately, the price means that there is little chance that the
descendants of the people that Gwyn Prescott writes of so eloquently
will get the chance to read about how the great house of rugby was built in
Cardiff.
However, if you do have the money there are a lot worse ways for a
rugby follower to spend £48.
TONY COLLINS # 2012
De Montfort University
Nikolaus Katzer, Sandra Budy, Alexandra Kohring and Manfred Zeller,
(eds.), Euphoria and Exhaustion: Modern Sport in Soviet Culture and
Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Pp. 358. $49.00 (hb).
ISBN 978-3-593-39290-5
Dealing with, inter alia, architecture, mountaineering, and training
methods, this volume is a most welcome addition to the Soviet sports
and physical culture repertoire, and brings together a wide range of essays
on different facets of Soviet sport. A host of international scholars deploy
new archival materials and an inter-disciplinary approach to provide
readers with a much needed analysis of the development of sport in the
Soviet Union. The stated objective of the collection is to situate Soviet
physical culture and sport within a broader cultural and social framework,
as a type of ‘dispositif ’ wherein private and public spaces and their use
in the Soviet Union can be more clearly demarcated. The question then, is
does this volume successfully amalgamate all of these diverse impressions
into a cohesive whole? The organisation of the chapters into three
thematic sections (sites and media; milieus and memory; gender and
science) certainly helps clarify and focus the work (no mean feat given the
vastness of such a topic). While it could be argued that this has the effect
of making the chronological organisation somewhat less well-defined, the
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transgression of temporal and spatial borders serves to strengthen
thematic commonalities and divergences over the entire Soviet period.
The first ‘site’ to which we are introduced is Imperial St. Petersburg,
where there is not a contestation or interaction but rather a segregation of
space. Different social groups interpreted sport and kept it within the
preserve of their own communities. The next chapter continues with an
emphasis on the cityscape, but has moved on to socialism, Moscow, and
the 1920s, with Alexandra Kohring’s probing analysis of the project to
construct the International Red Stadium. Of concern here is the
relationship between open space and the physical body, a viewpoint
exemplified by choreographer and former boxer Arkady Kharlampiev’s
mid-1920s argument for a fluid, non-structured spatial approach to the
Lenin Hills site (the proposed site for the stadium). The controversy
surrounding the project served to highlight ongoing problems during the
1920s in seeking to establish a single agreeable ideological vision for the
stadium but also for physical culture more generally.
Similar visionary differences and interpretations, albeit in the form and
movement of sculpture as opposed to architecture, emerge in Bettina
Jungen’s paper on sport, discipline and the arts in the 1930s. Meanwhile,
this same state of flux, as well as the tension between the individual and
the collective, is captured in Sandra Budy’s paper on the changing images
of sport in the early Soviet press. The photograph and art remain central
in the next essay, that of Christina Kiaer, on the work of an artist
(Aleksandr Deinika) and his muse (champion swimmer Liusia Vtorova),
which sheds light on the private, personal experiences of Soviet ideology.
The final instalment in this section leads us to Turkey and Ataturk’s
emphasis on sport as a means of modernisation realised through the
construction of stadia, parks, and sports complexes.
The next section introduces us to various milieus and memories, the
first of which takes us to Estonia where national memory and culture are
shown to be intrinsically bound up in the success of its leading sports
figures, especially strong men such as Georg Hackenscmidt, Kristjan
Palusalu, and Georg Lurich. The role of national culture also features in
Volodymyr Ginda’s essay on sport under German occupation, which saw
a resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism (in Galicia) conducted under the
cover of sports clubs. Although the Nazis supported sports events in
Ukraine for propaganda purposes, political education of Ukrainian youth
was not welcomed. The use of sport for the organisation or consolidation
of certain social milieus is addressed in Eva Maurer’s fascinating paper,
where she demonstrates how mountaineering became the preserve of
academics and, to a lesser extent, engineers � those with the time and
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money to afford such leisure (or rather an obraz zhizni or lifestyle) � thus
creating their own ‘climbing milieu’ within Soviet society. Drawing on
both memories and milieus, Manfred Zeller uses the football recollections
of three individuals as a means to explore their integration into post-
Stalinist society as well as the function of nostalgia, while at the same
time considering how these processes connected to the wider political
picture. Finally, Robert Edelman’s essay reveals much about the inter-
relationship between football, fans, and the political system, with the
controversial transfer of Spartak Moscow star Sergei Sal’nikov to Dinamo
highlighting football’s potential to arouse passion and politics in equal
measure.
The essays found in the final section on gender and science provide a
stimulating discussion of how issues originating in the 1920s were applied
and discussed in later periods. In analysing sport and science, Hans-
Joachim Braun and Nikolaus Katzer link the Soviet predilection for
scientific management, Taylorism, and sports training methods �especially those utilised by coach Valerii Lobanovskii in the 1970s and
1980s � to make a convincing case for the fusion of science and skill in
football. In the first of three essays on gender, Kateryna Kobchenko uses
physical culture and sport as a lens through which to view female
emancipation in the 1920s and 1930s. By donning the new sports
costumes and participating in sports, she argues that many women,
wittingly or not, identified with the new sporting image and adopted the
Soviet values that accompanied it. Continuing with the women theme,
Anke Hilbrenner explores the Soviet concept of zhenstvennost (femininity)
in the late 1960s. She argues persuasively that this was artificial and
constructed, moulded to fit the new aesthetic needs of the Brezhnev era.
Following on from this is Stefan Wiederkehr’s evaluation of gender as
portrayed in the western and socialist media during the Cold War. He
finds that, while these were generally similar in their traditional gender
stereotyping, there were marked differences in how the socialist media
treated the ‘less’ feminine images of Eastern bloc athletes.
The fairly extensive epilogue discusses a sports film from 1970 (Elem
Klimov’s Sport, Sport, Sport), and while interesting in its own right and
incorporating the volume’s concerns with issues such as politics and
image, would perhaps be more effective with some degree of integration
or introduction. Overall though, the volume works well. The contributors
provide strong arguments and thought-provoking papers that showcase
the range of issues and discussion stimulated by an analysis of any of the
many aspects of Soviet physical culture and sport. Given the sheer number
of essays to be covered, justice has not been done here to the individual
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contributions, many of which deserve to be reviewed in greater depth;
rather, it has been shown that the topics and themes in Euphoria and
Exhaustion offer plenty to interest the sports historian.
SUSAN GRANT # 2012
University College Dublin and University of Toronto
Jack Williams, Cricket and Broadcasting (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2011). Pp. 240. £60.00 (hb). ISBN 978-0719-0-7748-7
The relationship between cricket and broadcasting has been written about
more than any other form of mediated sport. This is partly because the
sport enjoys a voluminous catalogue of memoir, biography, journalism
and analysis, much of which has been written by former players turned
broadcasters, or journalists who also ply their trade in radio or television.
There have also those from within broadcasting, such as Brian Johnston,
John Arlott and Peter Baxter, who over the years have shared their insights
on commentary and the peculiarities in production of cricket broad-
casting. In spite of this literature, there has not been a detailed academic
history of cricket and broadcasting, which is why Jack Williams’ new book
in the Studies in Popular Culture series by Manchester University Press is
most welcome.
Cricket and Broadcasting brings together much of the literature on the
subject, with archival evidence and interviews with those who have made
this field of broadcasting a much treasured aspect of British popular
culture. Williams makes a compelling argument for a need to develop a
detailed study of the relationship between cricket and broadcasting in
order to understand how radio, and then television, transformed the
sport. Furthermore, in concentrating on how cricket has been covered by
both forms of media, it is possible to shed light on how the sport is
understood by the public, as editors, producers and commentators frame
and shape both our consumption and knowledge of cricket.
The book opens with a brief overview of existing studies of broad-
cast sport. Williams acknowledges the poverty of broadcast histories
of sport, particularly within general histories of radio and television,
which, with few exceptions, provide limited details of how sport became a
core ingredient of broadcast content and helped to build popular
audiences.
Drawing from papers held at a number of archives including the BBC
Written Archives Centre at Caversham, the MCC library and the papers of
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