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Putting Russia's Ban in Historical Perspective: A Curated Interview

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/26396025.4.1.02

2639-6025

Robert Edelman, Toby C. Rider,

Sports Analytics and Performance

RIDER: One of the best things about working in higher education is the immediate access you get to a vibrant intellectual community. At conferences, in meetings, even down the corridor from your office, you are easily able to meet people with fascinating perspectives on the world we live in today. After the escalation of Russia's war with Ukraine in February 2022, and the subsequent decision of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to ban Russian athletes from the Olympic Games, I formed my own opinions on what has happened and why. But an expert on such things, I am not. Keen to gather insights from someone who specializes in the intersection of sport with Russian (and Soviet) affairs, past and present, I turned to Professor Robert “Bob” Edelman, a historian at the University of California, San Diego. As the preeminent global scholar on the history of Russian/Soviet sport, who else could be better placed to put the invasion, and the IOC's response, in context? I hope that this curated interview, conducted over the course of several months via the exchange of email messages, proves as informative to readers as it did to me.RIDER: How did you begin researching Russian/Soviet sport history?EDELMAN: I suppose you could say I started studying Soviet sport from the first soccer game I went to in Moscow during 1965. It was the Soviet cup final, and Spartak played Dinamo Minsk. I then spent several long stints at Moscow State University in 1971 and 1975 researching my first book on the prerevolutionary Right. While I was there, I did the same things I did at home to keep sane: watching, reading about, and playing sports. The idea of studying it seemed like a path to academic suicide. I went to a lot of soccer games, but I wish I had taken notes. I did buy a small TV at one of the foreign currency shops and snuck it into the dorm at Moscow State University where I surreptitiously viewed any and all sports that were on television. The highlight was the “Thrilla in Manila,” which was shown because of Muhammad Ali's stand against the Vietnam War. I also made sure to buy the national sports newspaper, Sovetskii Sport, each day.I subsequently wound up writing two books on the politics of the Russian prerevolution. When I was finishing up the second in 1986, I got a call from a friend who was inviting me to give a paper on Soviet sport for a conference at Stanford on sports history and culture. It was early perestroika, and all things Soviet were fashionable. So, I decided to present on spectator sport in the USSR. It was somewhat autobiographical, and it turned out to be something of a flop. People wanted to hear about the Olympics, and I talked about soccer and hockey. Two weeks later, I gave the same talk at Indiana, and it was a smashing success. I continued to collect articles from Sovetskii Sport and watch recordings of games that were viewable on a giant $100,000 dish at the Rand Institute in Santa Monica. I never thought about publishing anything on sport history. The subject still was seen as marginal by mainstream historians.Since then, the historical profession has changed its idea of what is important, and the quality of research and writing on our subject has improved dramatically. Many more departments offer courses on the topic. Nearly every major academic press has titles on sports. Popular culture, once dismissed by mainstream historians, is now taken seriously. Many mainstream historical journals regularly feature articles. It is also no longer looked at critically by political activists, thanks to the pioneering thought of Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and the Birmingham School in the 1970s that opposed the New Left's refusal to see any form of resistance in pop culture.I would like to think the work that I have been doing since then has undermined the master narrative of Cold War sports history and that it tracks well with the way scholars now understand the postwar period in general. Multipolarity has replaced the bipolarity that informed what was our understanding of Cold War Olympic sports. Medal counts did not accurately reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the superpowers’ underlying social, cultural, and political systems. Were that so, the Soviet Union would still exist and be thriving, but the USSR was always weaker than it portrayed itself through its Olympic performances. By the same reasoning, the United States was a much stronger society than could be seen through its less than dominant Olympic performances. Our best athletes were professionals.RIDER: Historically speaking, there existed a tension between the IOC's philosophy of Olympism and the tenets of Soviet Communism. How, then, was the IOC and the Soviet Union able to cooperate for forty years after shunning each other after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917?EDELMAN: Olympism was originally intended as a movement of unpaid volunteer amateurs removed from governments and political parties. Yet it raised divisions of class, race, gender, and nation despite its messages of world peace and harmony. Workers and women were initially not welcome. People of color could participate only as subjects of empires. As your readers all know, the IOC was a nongovernmental organization that practiced a politics of the nonpolitical. That pretense became difficult to sustain once the world's first communist state was carefully welcomed. If they were not the parents of politicized sport, the Soviets took the practice to new levels. They made grand claims about the meanings of their success while seeking to “democratize” the white, elite, male world of the IOC. The West preferred to think of the Soviets as Marxists who imposed the political onto what was supposed to be an autonomous realm of culture.Yet it turned out communism and Olympism were not diametrically opposed. They actually shared many values, practices, and concerns. If the Soviet decision to join a conservative organization in 1951 was expedient, even cynical, they did find a measure of comfort in paying fealty to Olympic norms and practices. Both movements accepted modernity, which they understood to be dynamic, industrial, and urban. The IOC held its summer spectacles in cities; communism and socialism drew their initial political support from the towns where capitalism had emerged. The United States and Great Britain invoked myths of the pastoral to normalize this new form of popular culture, but the rural world with its demands for hard physical labor was not a site for sporting activity. Arenas, parks, and streets were the places where modern sport was played.Both movements were internationalist. They viewed themselves as forces for world peace. Pierre De Coubertin invoked such semifictional practices as the Olympic truce, while communists urged the workers of the world to unite. Both faced fundamental contradictions posed by nationalism and the nation state. Olympic athletes were required to take part not as individuals but as citizens who wore the uniforms of nations. Their victories were celebrated with the playing of national anthems and the raising of flags, but practices that fostered healthy pride and patriotism could devolve into chauvinism and racism. The USSR was a multinational, multicultural affirmative action empire composed of various nationalities who subordinated themselves to a centralized Soviet power, but it ultimately fell prey to the centrifugal ethnic tensions that proved fundamental to its collapse.Both communism and Olympism believed in the possibility of social improvement. Neither accepted the notion of an unchanging human nature. Both shared hope for a better world. People, performances, societies, and cultures could get better. Humanity was not the prisoner of its present. For Olympism, this vision was best expressed by the famously liberal slogan of “faster, higher, stronger,” adopted in 1921. For the Soviets, this striving took the form of the “bright and shining future.” But for sport to propel social and cultural change, it could not simply be entertaining; it had to be educational as well. The Olympic Movement justified its exalted status by arguing sport taught important life lessons. All forms of Soviet mass culture, sports in particular, were supposed to be didactic. Yet, of the many forms of popular culture produced in the USSR, sport, with its inescapable spontaneity and unpredictability, was an imprecise practice deployed by a party-state that sought in vain to control its citizens. Cultural forms could have no impact if no one was watching. In order to be effective, they had to be entertaining. Just what was entertaining changed over time.Both movements accepted the codes of formal amateurism that rejected the capitalist commercialism of professional sport. Their rituals and symbols were characterized by grandiosity and pomposity. Olympic opening ceremonies were tellingly similar to the annual Physical Culture Day parades held each summer on Red Square. Dignitaries in elevated boxes closed to the larger public surveyed such events from above as thousands of athletes in various sorts of dress marched past them stepping in unison. Yet in both cases, there were moments of the carnivalesque. Olympic Games ended with closing ceremonies that were far less orderly than the openings. When the official and rehearsed parts of the Moscow parades finished and the missiles and tanks were long gone, the public was invited to stumble through the square in happily chaotic moments that were usually enhanced by alcohol.RIDER: In the past, the IOC frequently turned a blind eye to world events. Were there any examples of this happening with the Soviet Union? How does that compare to the current response to Vladimir Putin? Does this change the broader historiography of Russian/Soviet Olympic history?EDELMAN: As John Hoberman has written, the IOC historically practiced a form of amorality in its relations with authoritarian governments. The practice began in 1936 with the Berlin Olympics, which had been awarded to Germany two years before the Nazis came to power. The IOC did not move their mega-event. At its heart, this approach rested on the Olympic Movement's maddening belief that sport and politics should not mix. As we all know, the IOC has been comfortable dealing with several other seriously unsavory regimes since then. In 1974, the arguments from human rights activists against awarding the USSR the 1980 Games was a case in point. The choice, however, was made at a time of Cold War détente which would soon devolve. Perhaps the more telling moment came in 1980. The IOC showed no inclination to strip Moscow of the event after the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan in December 1979. That highly controversial step was explained by Moscow and accepted by Lausanne as a necessary response to political instability in a nation that bordered on the USSR. The IOC was able to justify not taking any action which could have been construed as bringing politics into sport. Indeed, the Soviets had the sheer gall to accuse the US of doing precisely that. They defended themselves by claiming politics should not interfere in sport. Both superpowers used their governments’ full diplomatic and political resources to convince other nations to either boycott or attend the event, especially in the Global South. Ignati Novikov, chair of the Moscow Organizing Committee, spent days and days making promises and offering to pay expenses. This was especially important to many African nations, not all of which showed up in Moscow. As far as the IOC was concerned, the sheer complexity of changing the site of the Games on short notice led them to stay with Moscow. It has been said an Olympic Games is like an aircraft carrier; they change direction very slowly.Similarly, the 2014 Winter Games were given out in 2007 at a moment when Putin still cared what the rest of the world thought. At the time, he traveled to Guatemala and addressed the IOC in English and French; there, he called for a Winter Games to be held in what had always been a beach resort. He claimed the 1980 event had been tarnished, and this was a way to compensate Russia for the unfair diminution of the Moscow Games. Yet, when the time came in 2014, he had less interest in soft power and prestige and more interest in instilling a problematic imperial nationalism in his citizens. We now know he had been planning well before the Games to annex Crimea, which had been turned over to the Ukrainian Socialist Republic by Nikita Khrushchev in the early fifties. Yet he waited until after the Closing Ceremony before moving in. As Jenifer Parks has shown in detail, much of the story of Soviet sport had involved the Kremlin's desire to fit into an elite, white, male organization that had always been comfortable with the many contradictions posed by empires. It is possible that Putin thought this past history would apply to this latest step and he would pay no political price. If numerous dictators had not been penalized, why should he have been any different? Hitler had occupied the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936. Britain and France were not prepared to respond, and the Berlin Games went on.RIDER: How can we understand this present ban in terms of Putin's relationship with the Olympic Movement? In the past, I am thinking of Sochi 2014 here, he has used the festival for political capital. Will this mean an end to Russian bids?EDELMAN: Given the IOC's surprisingly forceful stance in this latest moment, after the invasion of Ukraine, it is safe to expect Russia will not be wasting its time by bidding on any event, including world and continental championships. They have been stripped of hosting the UEFA Champions League final in St. Petersburg and kicked out of the 2022 men's FIFA World Cup. Between the doping scandal and the annexation of Crimea, it is safe to say, Putin squandered whatever soft power could have been generated by hosting a mega-event. It had always seemed crazy to invest 50 billion dollars into impressing his countrymen of Russia's imperial greatness. On the other hand, the 2018 World Cup appears to have been a successful effort in demonstrating the competence and responsibility of a new Russia that wanted to appear normal and civilized. Clearly much had transpired in the four years between 2018 and 2022 to turn what had been a soft power triumph aimed at world opinion into an exercise in imperial nationalism for domestic consumption. FIFA did not take the World Cup from Russia after 2014.RIDER: Do you see Russia pushing forward with their own sporting competitions with allies, something along the lines of the Friendship Games in 1984?EDELMAN: Were any such event to be credible, it would have to include China. Yet China relies so much on its trade with the rest of the world, it is hard to imagine they would jeopardize it. It is, of course, possible Russian oil could literally lubricate such an event. It is worth remembering that the so-called Soviet bloc Friendship Games of 1984, which took place in several East European capitals over the period of a month, were not a great success. While they produced some notable results and several noncommunist nations sent teams, the West was not impressed. Those multiple events took place before and after the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in which the USSR chose not to participate. They did this for a complicated set of reasons, none of which involved revenge. LA 84, which the US predictably dominated, was a triumph in the eyes of American politicians and audiences. There are those in Russia today who view the decision to stay home as a mistake. Had the Soviets truly wanted revenge, showing up and dominating the US on its own turf would have been a much louder statement. Their own experts’ analysis had suggested they would win forty-three gold medals.RIDER: Do you see any connection between the IOC's response to the Russian doping scandal and how the IOC responded to the invasion of Ukraine?EDELMAN: The elaborate doping scandal at Sochi had been planned well in advance. Russian athletes gave clean samples which were secretly swapped for the drugged samples they gave at the Games. All this was revealed by the Russian doctor who ran their doping lab. He defected to the West, admitted this all publicly, and is now in the witness protection program somewhere in the US. What was supposed to be a triumph turned out to be an embarrassment. Yet, cheating clean athletes out of medals and gaining prestige for drug-aided triumphs, however reprehensible, is hardly comparable to a monstrously bloody and thoroughly cynical unprovoked war. The IOC's unprecedented and somewhat surprising response has been drastically harsher in the Ukrainian case because the crime is far worse. On the other hand, Lausanne has been historically indifferent to human rights abuses, including those of the Soviet Union. Presently, China's mistreatment of its Islamic Uighur population did not prevent the IOC from awarding them not one but two events. Back in 1956, there was no suggestion that the Soviets should be banned from the Melbourne Games for the invasion and suppression of the revolt in Hungary, nor were they disinvited from Mexico in 1968 after sending in tanks to suppress political reform in Czechoslovakia.RIDER: This is a slightly more philosophical question, but do you think the rationale behind the IOC's decision to ban Russian athletes is justified? Does the IOC have a sound moral basis for its action? Or is this ban unprecedented?EDELMAN: In the past, the IOC has excluded entire nations and their athletes. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Soviets disdained the Olympics, and the IOC wanted no part of them. Austria, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey were banned from Antwerp in 1920 after World War I. Losing a war can do that. The new German republic was not allowed to participate at Paris in 1924, while their allies were invited. In the wake of World War II, Germany and Japan were kept from taking part at London in 1948. Their fellow member of the Axis, Italy, was invited. From 1964 (Tokyo) until 1988 (Seoul), apartheid South Africa was not allowed to compete as part of an international campaign led by the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa to isolate Pretoria from a range of sports, most notably rugby union and cricket, neither an Olympic sport. Indonesia and North Korea were not at Tokyo in 1964 as a result of their organization of the competing Games of the New Emerging Forces at Jakarta in 1963.I would think most reasonable observers would see all but the latter case as moral choices by the IOC. On the other hand, Italy was given the 1956 Winter Games just four years after World War II. This would seem a morally obtuse move. Yet it is just possible the IOC wanted to reward Italy for electing conservative parliamentary majorities in 1948 when all polls were predicting a Communist win. The Left had not collaborated with the Fascists. This was one of the first great victories of the newly created CIA, which sent people and money to obtain the desirable result in favor of the Right. But yes, I do think the IOC was justified in banning Russia, even if it penalizes those who have spoken out. You could argue a distinction should be made between national teams and individual athletes who might well oppose the war.RIDER: A significant number of Russian athletes compete in various leagues around world and are exposed to considerable anti-Russian sentiment. Are Russian athletes speaking out about the ban? How has the response of Russian athletes today compared to their Soviet counterparts in the past?EDELMAN: Several tennis players, including Daniil Medvedev and Andrey Rublev, have spoken out. There are many Russians in the National Hockey League, but I have not heard much of an anti-war message from them. Washington Capitals’ star Alexander Ovechkin has been closely tied to Putin in the past and has spoken out of both sides of his mouth, hiding behind the old “I am just an athlete” trope. There are just a few Russians in the top European soccer leagues right now, and they seem to be minding their own business. Inside Russia, only Fyodor Smolov, the Dinamo Moscow star attacker, has made appeals for peace. For decades, since the collapse of the USSR, there has been a sizable Russian sports diaspora living and working in the West. Still, this outcry is more than we would have heard in Soviet times. I know of no Soviet athlete who spoke out against the war in Afghanistan at the time of the invasion, but by the last years of glasnost there would have been no danger in opposing an unwinnable war. Yet athletes at that time did not make public stands. There were only two outright defections, Sergey Feodorov and Aleksandr Mogilny, and these were not about world politics. Others like Vyacheslav Fetisov and Igor Larionov were able to complain loudly in the media about wanting to play in the NHL without having to cut their ties to their families and friends. Their conflict with the coach of the army and national team, Viktor Tikhonov, was front page news. Eventually, they and others made their way to North America and still played for the Soviet national team. The outflow of soccer players to the big European leagues after they were runners-up at Euro 1988 was even greater than in hockey. In the wake of the Seoul Games that same year, Soviet and Yugoslav basketball players started showing up in the NBA and western Europe. Only the Lithuanians expressed their views and that was after 1990 when they declared independence.RIDER: In conclusion, is the IOC's ban resonating in Russia? How does the Russian public see it? I know you keep an eye on the Russian news, how is the ban being presented by the Russian media?EDELMAN: This is the really demoralizing part. While some four million Russians, including many of my friends have left, there was little public dissent. The threat of fifteen years in prison for protest is truly intimidating. In some ways there was much more wiggle room under late communism. Not all dissidents were jailed back then. Some of my close friends actually support the war. I watch sports events on Russian TV, and it all seems quite normal. There are many foreigners, especially Brazilians, in their men's soccer league. A few Finns and Swedes are in their hockey league, which includes a number of neighboring countries, China included. Men's basketball still features several players of African descent. As we know from the Brittney Griner case, numerous Americans were playing in the well-funded women's league. Much has been made of making things seem normal, and Putin wants it that way. Sanctions sadly have not killed their economy. If anything, criticism has come from rightist nationalists who think Putin needs to send more troops and heavier, perhaps even nuclear, weapons. During the war in Afghanistan (theirs not ours), the return of body bags did much to alienate ordinary citizens. I have not read anything about that now. If people here want to get a sense of how a more or less liberal sports website is navigating the situation, go on sports.ru and click on the English translation button. Their stories eschew excessive patriotism but do not openly oppose the war. We shall see what the latest response to mass conscription will bring. Several of their reporters are now outside the country. They interviewed me during the World Cup and asked really difficult questions. I watch a lot of Russian sports now online, and you would have no idea a war was on.