Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Cold War Olympics: A New Battlefront in Psychological Warfare, 1948–56 by Harry Blutstein

2024; The MIT Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/jcws_r_01205

1531-3298

John Soares,

Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology

In Cold War Olympics, Australian journalist/author Harry Blutstein has revised, for North American readers, the book he published in Australia in 2017 as Cold War Games. Blutstein covers a wide range of issues and actors, in lively and readable fashion, with a focus on the Olympics in 1952 and 1956.Cold War Olympics includes some great stories about fascinating characters. Among them are the tale readers may know from Robert Edelman's work regarding Nikolai Starostin, the Soviet soccer star who was caught between Joseph Stalin's son Vasilii, who wanted Starostin for the Air Force club, and Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrentii Beria, who wanted the star for the Dinamo club. (pp. 23–24). Blutstein also covers the pageantry and gullibility of Avery Brundage's 1954 trip to the USSR as president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Brundage visited the Soviet Union at a time when many in the West suspected—correctly, although evidently unnoticed by Brundage—that Soviet Olympians were flouting IOC rules.Blutstein entertainingly describes the controversy over a Sport in Art exhibition to be sponsored by the United States Information Agency at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. The exhibition, which had been widely shown at art museums in the United States earlier in the year, was withheld from the Olympics after anti-Communist activists in Dallas expressed doubts about the political reliability of four of the artists. Blutstein gives ample attention to the bitterly fought water polo match ("blood in the water") between Hungary and the USSR at the Melbourne Games. He also covers the courtship of two track-and-field athletes, Hal Connolly from the United States and Olga Fikotová from Czechoslovakia. This episode was part whirlwind romance, part Cold War drama, with an added twist of Catholic-Protestant conflict. In the end, Czechoslovakia's Communist government and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston scrambled to make peace with the marriage, lest they reap negative publicity for thwarting romance.Those who fondly recall Olympic amateurism will be impressed, and pained, by the story of Dutch decathlete Evert "Eef" Kamerbeek, who worked 48 hours a week on his job even while training for the Melbourne Games. Lacking access to a lighted track after work, he did his athletic workouts in a makeshift home gymnasium. In the end, Kamerbeek's sacrifices were all for naught. He was unable to compete in Melbourne because the Dutch Olympic Committee boycotted the games in protest at the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which occurred in early November 1956, less than three weeks before the Olympics began.These and other stories are engagingly told and dramatize the politics of Cold War sport, including the impact of political considerations on the athletes. Blutstein's sources include newspapers from the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union, as well as Australian government documents, giving deserved attention to the 1956 Olympics. Some scholars will wish for more footnotes and information about some sources. I especially wanted more details about the Hungary-USSR water polo match at Melbourne and military support for U.S. Olympic athletes. Scholars interested in the defection of Hungarians after the 1956 Olympics will want to supplement this book with a reading of Toby C. Rider's chapter, "The State-Private Network: Overt and Covert U.S. Intervention in Early Cold War Sport," in Robert Edelman and Christopher Young, eds., The Whole World was Watching: Sport in the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), pp. 14–42. For more detailed political background on the U.S. and Soviet sports systems, this book should be supplemented by Erin Elizabeth Redihan's The Olympics and the Cold War, 1948–1968: Sport as Battleground in the U.S.–Soviet Rivalry (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2017).U.S. readers might wish that Cold War Olympics had been stronger on athletic scholarships and ice hockey. Blutstein concedes that U.S. violations of amateur strictures were "nowhere near as egregious" (p. 52) as the Soviet bloc's violations, but he harps on the "generous" athletic scholarships given by North American universities (pp. 67, 148). Athletic scholarships, which were a fact of big-time college sports in the United States even before they became legal under intercollegiate rules in 1956, are difficult to square with notions of amateurism, but there was a circularity to them: the university gave money to students, who returned it to the university as tuition and fees. A school's "generosity" was a direct function of how expensive its tuition was. Scholarship athletes were not enjoying a luxurious lifestyle on their "living allowance" (p. 52), and intercollegiate athletes, whether on scholarship or not, were typically required to be—or at least pose as—full-time students, limiting how much time they trained. All of this was a far cry from the Communist approach that permitted athletes to train full-time, year-round, while enjoying compensation and perks available only to the most elite members of society.In writing specifically about ice hockey in the 1940s and early 1950s, Blutstein asserts that U.S. scholarship athletes had "access to professional coaches and top notch facilities" (p. 52), but in those years top college hockey coaches were often part-timers who had a separate, full-time occupation. The few universities that possessed their own "facilities" had a barn with ice-making equipment. Athletes like Kamerbeek may have longed for such coaching and accommodations, but they were a far cry from the extensive, lavish coaching and facilities at U.S. universities today.In dealing with hockey in the Olympics after 1956, Blutstein writes that "future finals would be between the Central Red Army team and the United States" (p. 55). However, Olympic hockey in the Cold War years had no "finals." Instead, medal-round play involved six teams (four in 1980 and 1984) in round-robin competition. The United States rarely contended for the gold medal, which was often decided when the USSR played Czechoslovakia. Soviet Olympic hockey teams usually included significant contingents from Dinamo, Spartak, and Krylya Sovetov (Wings of the Soviets), in addition to the nucleus from the Central Army.Also, Blutstein's writing sometimes veers into melodrama. For example, his contention that right-wing American anti-Communists gave "speeches brimming with bile, belligerence, and bombast" (p. 72) recalls U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew's speech bashing the "nattering nabobs of negativism" (an alliteration devised by the speechwriter William Safire). The Dutch Olympic Committee may have erred in boycotting Melbourne, but Blutstein's description of the committee's "callous . . . use" of its athletes is overwrought (p. 100). Hungarian exploitation of the gash inflicted on water polo player Ervin Zador by a Soviet opponent during the Soviet-Hungarian match was calculated but hardly "ruthless" (p. 194). Blutstein is right that cultural diplomacy and psychological warfare are related, but he goes too far in claiming that the former is just a "euphemism" for the latter (p. 70). The book also should have had a conclusion to pull together its findings rather than suddenly stopping after discussing a post-Melbourne tour of the United States by Hungarian athletes.These drawbacks aside, Blutstein tells some interesting stories about fascinating characters and important issues. He gives deserved attention to Australia in 1956 and to the impact of Cold War politics on athletes. His book makes a contribution to the growing literature on the intersection of sports and politics during the Cold War.