The Russian Origins of Sport Psychology: A Translation of an Early Work of A. C. Puni

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Tatiana V. Ryba and Craig A. Wrisberg are with the Department of Exercise (ADD), Sport and Leisure Studies at the University of Tennessee. Natalia B. Stambulova is with the Department of Social and Health Sciences at Halmstad University, Sweden.

Notes

¹The second author worked closely with Puni as an undergraduate student (1971–1974), doctoral student (1974–1977), and colleague (1977–1986) in the Department of Sport Psychology at the Lesgaft Institute until Puni's death in 1986. Besides having had personal communication with Puni on a daily basis for 15 years, she was one of three persons invited by Puni's family to sort through his personal archives after his death. Information for this biographical sketch was obtained from these archives (Puni, 1978) as well as from works by Shakhverdov, Semenov, Bogdanova, and Kiselev (1970) and Volkov, Gorbunov, and Stambulova (1998).

²Students at the Lesgaft Institute of Physical Culture could take additional coursework to obtain a second diploma in physical rehabilitation. Puni had pursued this course of study and was a certified “metodist po lechebnoi fizkulture” [rehabilitation specialist]. During the blockade of Leningrad, he provided physical rehabilitation assistance for wounded soldiers and civilians.

³The line of research in the Department of Sport Psychology at that time included: a) psychological aspects of motor learning (i.e., technical preparation of athletes), including ideomotor training, the role of self-talk, development of awareness/non-awareness of motor habits, etc.; b) psychological aspects of tactical preparation (i.e., thinking, memory, anticipation); c) volition in sport and exercise; and d) psychological characteristics of sport in general and of specific sports (see Abelskaya, 1955, 1957a, 1957b; Abelskaya & Surkov, 1955; Egupov, 1955; Puni, 1952, 1955, 1957a, 1957b, 1957c, 1959; Rafalovich, 1955).

⁴Complete bibliographical information was not available for some of the references Puni cited.

⁵In a subsequent paper, Puni discussed more specifically the notion of two types of psychological preparation; general (i.e., learning of fundamental skills such as self regulation and volitional preparation) and specific (i.e., plans for a particular competition).

⁶In this paragraph, Puni emphasizes the importance of coaches knowing and implementing the psychological aspects of sport training (mentioned in the previous paragraph). Puni felt that while some coaches (like Belitz-Geiman) recognized this point, others disregarded it or were still unaware of its importance. The psychological aspects of physical, technical, and tactical preparation of athletes represented the primary emphasis of Soviet sport psychology in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the USSR (and still today in Russia) coaching was/is a profession. In order to become a professional coach at any level (not only the elite level), a person was required to graduate from an Institute of Physical Culture and Sport (consisting of four years of education, including pedagogical practice with athletes and teams under the supervision of professors and professional coaches). Once they completed their education, professional coaches were required to participate in additional refresher training experiences every five years in order to stay abreast of the latest information from the sport sciences. Puni's reproach of coaches in the last two sentences of this paragraph illustrates his belief that it was the duty of all Soviet coaches to be aware of new developments in the sport sciences.

⁷In this sentence, Puni once again stresses the importance of psychological preparation for specific competitions as opposed to the more general psychological training advocated by other Soviet sport psychologists.

⁸The Russian word for athlete is in the male gender. However, most Russian readers of Puni's day understood that whenever he used that word, he was referring to both male and female athletes.

⁹Communist morality may be briefly defined as a set of collective norms that emphasizes the priority of communal interests (e.g., of the team, of the country, etc.) over those of any individual. Most articles published during the Soviet era were more or less ideologically oriented. Interestingly, Puni was not a member of the communist party, which was very unusual for a person of his stature (professor and head of the department of sport psychology). However, to maintain this stature, Puni was obliged to demonstrate his ideological loyalty, and he always did. At the same time, terms like “communist morality,” “communist upbringing,” and “advantages of the socialist way of life,” were typical ideological clichés that appeared in most published literature. The majority of Soviet citizens perceived such expressions as “the normal way of thinking.”

¹⁰According to Russian terminology, “development” refers to a process of change within a person. The terms “education” and “upbringing” refer to different socially-organized pedagogical processes. Formal education deals with the development of students' knowledge and skills while upbringing deals with the formation of their personalities (i.e., motivation, moral values, character, etc.). Both education and upbringing include interactions between teachers and students (i.e., joint activities) as well as students' own efforts at self-improvement.

¹¹Pavlov proposed the notion of two signal systems, one that is non-verbal (e.g., when a person responds to a real object, as in a case of a hungry man who secrets saliva upon looking at a plate of food) and a second that is verbal (e.g., when a hungry person secretes saliva while speaking or hearing food-related words).

¹²Puni was probably the first Russian sport psychologist to emphasize the point that athletes should not be dependent on their coaches for making the right decisions in competition. This was a radical (and risky) concept for someone to propose within an autocratic Soviet society; however, Puni strongly believed that athletes who could not make decisions for themselves would not be good competitors.

¹³Essentially, Puni identified three types of competitions during a season, each differing in terms of its significance to the athlete. Main/central competitions were considered to be the most significant; Puni called them “the focus of the season.” Antecedent competitions were those that prepared athletes for the main competition, and sometimes were used to determine which athletes would participate in the main competition. Additional competitions occurred following the main competition and assumed various levels of importance to athletes.

¹⁴“Master of sport” was one of the highest levels of proficiency an athlete could achieve under the Universal Sport Classification system that existed in the Soviet Union and that is still used in Russia today. This system included a set of criteria that allowed comparisons of athletes' performances in any given sport. In ascending order, levels of classification consisted of three junior grades (3rd, 2nd, and 1st), three senior grades (3rd, 2nd, and 1st), master of sport candidate, master of sport, master of sport international, and honored master of sport. An athlete who was a master of sport in any event would be someone who had won two or three awards at the junior national championship, placed among the top ten in the senior championship, and at least took part in international competitions.

¹⁵Schelkanova was a famous athlete in the sport of track and field and a popular role model for younger athletes.

¹⁶Elite athletes were expected to serve as role models of communist morality for Soviet young people in general and for young Soviet athletes in particular. Schelkanova's use of the word “consciousness” in this quote is assumed to be synonymous with the notion of communist morality.

¹⁷It was assumed that the three stages of psychological preparation for a competition represented different degrees of “maturity” of the action plan and the athlete's readiness to execute it.

¹⁸Here Puni describes three indicators of an athlete's psychological readiness for competition that were presumably due to the athlete's psychological preparation. Later in his completed theory of psychological preparation for a specific competition, Puni suggested and empirically confirmed five symptoms, including the preceding three, that were considered most important by Soviet sport psychologists. Of the three indicators Puni mentions here, the first, “sensible confidence,” is the result of a rational analysis that leads the athlete to the belief that she/he can “do my best” during a performance. The second indicator refers to the athlete's readiness to overcome obstacles of various degrees of difficulty, including unexpected ones. The third represents the athlete's active aspiration to strive and persist in a competition to the very end in order to achieve the desired goal or an even greater one.

¹⁹Kutsenko was an honored master of the sport of weight lifting. In the anecdote Puni refers to here, Kutsenko (1960) provides a brief description of the way Minaev's coaches used various psychological techniques to prepare him for the 1960 Olympic games in Rome. That year had not started out well for Minaev. He had not displayed his usual prowess in competitions and his best results were considerably lower than those of the American weight lifter, Berger. Minaev's confidence had begun to diminish and he almost failed to qualify for the Olympic Games. In order to improve Minaev's psychological state of mind, his coaches told him not to worry about winning the gold medal but to just focus on the silver, which was a very realistic goal. Minaev's coaches also encouraged him to just focus on his training, trust his plan, and simply try to avoid injuries. With those things in mind, Minaev's training improved, his confidence was restored, and he began to show the kind of form he had displayed in earlier years. Just before the Olympic games began, Minaev's coaches told him they thought he had a good chance to win the gold medal if the competitive situation was favorable. Minaev subsequently won the gold and Kutsenko attributed this victory in large part to the psychological preparation strategy Minaev's coaches had developed and implemented.