Petersen Buchimport: Bibliografie

Zusatztext
- The architects of the Soviet Union intended not merely to remake their society-they also had an ambitious plan to remake the citizenry physically, with the goal of perfecting the socialist ideal of man. As Euphoria and Exhaustion shows, the Soviet leadership used sports as one of the primary arenas in which to deploy and test their efforts to mechanize and perfect the human body, drawing on knowledge from physiology, biology, medicine, and hygiene. At the same time, however, such efforts, like any form of social control, could easily lead to discontent-and thus, the editors show, a study of changes in public attitude towards sports can offer insight into overall levels of integration, dissatisfaction and social exhaustion in the Soviet Union.
Autorenportrait
- Nikolaus Katzer ist Professor für Osteuropäische Geschichte an der Helmut-Schmidt- Universität Hamburg und Direktor des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Moskau. Sandra Budy, Alexandra Köhring und Manfred Zeller sind Mitarbeiter im DFGProjekt "Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte der Körperkultur und des Sports in der Sowjetunion".
Leseprobe
- Sites and Media: Introduction Mike O'Mahony In October 1920, at the Third All-Union Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, the role that sport and physical culture should play in the newly established Soviet state was enshrined in an official declaration: "The physical culture of the younger generation is an essential element in the overall system of communist upbringing of young people, aimed at creating harmoniously developed human beings, creative citizens of communist society." More pragmatically, the declaration continued to outline two practical goals that the development of sport should work towards: (1) preparing young people for work; and (2) preparing them for military defence of Soviet power. Just over two decades later, as men and women from through-out the Soviet Union exchanged their sports outfits for military garb and marched, sometimes straight from sports parades, to the military front to defend the nation from Nazi invasion, few citizens were in any doubt regarding the officially approved associations between sport, labor and military training. As one military leader argued in an article published in the journal Fizkul'tura i sport in 1941, the conflict would provide both the culmination and ultimate testing ground for this policy. Yet, it should be noted, this idealistic vision of the value of sport for society was one that was not necessarily shared by all participants in and spectators of, sport. The widespread notion that the growth of sport in the Soviet Union might simply be read as little more than a means by which the state coerced the masses to serve its needs, has proven to be a pervasive one, especially during the Cold War period. Here, Soviet successes in international sport, most notably at the Olympic Games, served further to shape Western interpretations of the Soviet state's official attitudes towards sport as a social practice. However, as many of the essays in this section reveal, the transformations that Russian and Soviet sport underwent, particularly during the period from the late Tsarist era up to the Second World War, were in fact far more diverse, complex and nuanced than the model of the great Soviet sports machine might suggest. Indeed, as many historians of Soviet sport have shown in recent years, sport during this period might best be regarded, perhaps appropriately enough, as a contested arena, rather than simply as one of totalitarian command. For whilst the authorities, as the notional producers of sport, may well have aspired to promote sporting activities for the objectives proposed above, the public at large, frequently consumed sport in a manner that did not necessarily fulfil these aspirations. Thus, whilst the authorities valued sport as a means, variously to strengthen the organism and develop specific and pragmatic physical skills and regarded sports spectatorship as a means to educate and enhance a notion of collectivity, for the public, sporting activity could equally serve as a vehicle for personal physical expression and competition for competition's sake, whilst spectatorship frequently manifested itself in the form of a fan culture where team loyalty was based on a desire to celebrate heroes or be part of a smaller, more exclusive counterculture. Put more simply, whilst the state promoted sport as a social duty, it could equally be engaged with as a personal and pleasurable distraction and even a form of passive resistance. Inevitably, many of the key debates about sport were conducted amongst high ranking officials and members of state-sanctioned sports organizations. However, these debates also filtered out into a broader public arena, not least in the pages of the national and sports press, thus generating a widespread public discourse on sport. Thus, to gain a broader understanding of what sport may have signified to the public at large, a wider set of research resources needs to be examined.

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Euphoria and Exhaustion