Bolsheviks, Revolution and Physical Culture

Abstract

This article assesses the impact of the October Revolution of 1917 and the role of its leading revolutionaries on physical culture and sport. Foremost among these was Bolshevik leader Vladimir I. Lenin, and his contribution to the shaping of sport in the Soviet Union receives particular attention. Key to fully understanding Lenin's role in the development of physical culture and sport is the Lenin ‘myth’ and its interpretation in later Soviet sports discourse. The combination of the Lenin myth and Marxist–Leninist ideology was part of an ongoing Soviet effort to shape the ideal socialist citizen. The Bolshevik project was concerned with forging a new self and physical culture was an important part of this process. Thus, this article highlights intersections between the physical and emotional self, arguing that physical culture and sport were instrumental in contributing to revolutionary vision.

Keywords::

• Bolsheviks
• revolution
• physical culture
• Lenin
• sport

Acknowledgements

I thank James Ryan and Sylvain Dufraisse, who read and commented on this paper. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the author.

Notes

^1.Elwood, “The Sporting Life of V. I. Lenin,” 94.

^2.Prokofiev, “Fizicheskaya Kul'tura v zhizni V. I. Lenina.” Quite bizarrely, and more than a little out of place, this article on Lenin and sport featured in a nursing journal.

^3.Holquist, “Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work”; Halfin, Red Autobiographies.

^4. For more discussion of some of these ideas, see Starks, The Body Soviet; Hoffmann, “Bodies of Knowledge: Physical Culture and the New Soviet Man,” in Halfin, Language and Revolution.

^5. That many did idolise those who had adopted the lifestyle of the ‘New Soviet Person’ is undisputed. Admiration and awe for these new Soviet warriors and bureaucrats have been recounted, predominantly among the young and impressionable. See, for example, Novak-Deker, Soviet Youth, especially 53–4.

^6.Elwood, “The Sporting Life of V. I. Lenin,” 93.

^7. See Bowlt, “Body Beautiful.” For further discussion of the New Man, see Fritzsche and Hellbeck, “The New Man in Stalinist Russia.”

^8. For more on the cult of Lenin, see Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!

^9.Demetr, Lenin ob okhrane, 26. It is worth noting here that works produced in the Soviet period faced ideological restrictions. Some of those who wrote on physical culture and sport were members of the History and Organization Faculty of Physical Culture in the Moscow Institute of Physical Culture, and so were unlikely candidates for a neutral treatment of physical culture, no doubt being obliged to toe the party line and provide the ‘accepted’, ideologically correct history of the movement. See, for example, Samoukov, Istoriya fizicheskoi kul'tury; Chudinov, Osnovnye postanovleniya, prikazy i instruktsii po voprosam sovetskoi fizicheskoi kul'tury i sporta 1917–1957. See Bibliograficheskii ukazatel' nauchno-issledovatel'skikh i nauchno-metodicheskikh trudov professorov i prepodavetelei instituta (1920–1961) (Moscow, 1964).

^10. There were some notable exceptions, for example Mikhail V. Frunze, Feliks E. Dzerzhinsky, Sergei M. Kirov and Anatoly V. Lunacharsky. See Demetr, Lenin ob okhrane, 28.

^11. Ibid., 27.

^12. Ibid., 29. In 279 published letters to relatives (‘k rodnym’), more than 80 of these mentioned physical culture.

^13.Riordan, Sport, Politics, and Communism, 23–4.

^14. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 Chapter 10, Section Five. Accessed July 19, 2013. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm

^15.Burban and Solodkii, “Dal'neishee razvitie KPSS i voploshchenie v zhizn' Leninskikh idei o fizicheskom vospitanii,” 111.

^16.Achcar, “Engels.”

^17.Vospitanie is not a term that translates directly into English. It means more than just education (which is ‘obrazovanie’) and refers to upbringing, habits, mores, etc.

^18.Demetr, Lenin ob okhrane, 10. See Riordan, Sport, Politics, and Communism, 245.

^19.Demetr, Lenin ob okhrane, 11.

^20. Rossisskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial'no Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI), f.17, op.10, d.25, l.24. During the civil war, women were also participate in Vsevobuch training and activities. For more on this, see Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 52–7. See also Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, chapter 4. It should be noted here that other groups such as the Scouts remained in existence during this period and were gradually taken over by the Bolsheviks.

^21. For more on Vsevobuch and the organisation of physical culture and sport in the Soviet Union, see Grant, “The Politics of Physical Culture in the 1920s” and Physical Culture and Sport.

^22.Riordan, Sport, Politics, and Communism, 24.

^23.Demetr, Lenin ob okhrane, 23.

^24. For more on worker sport activities in Russia, see Riordan, “Worker Sport within a Worker State”.

^25.Demetr and Gorbunov, 70 let sovetskogo sorta/Liudi, sobytiya, fakty, 12. The ‘moral’ dimension remained an important element of physical culture and sport throughout the Soviet period.

^26. For more on the relationship between these two Podvoisky and Semashko, as well as other leading figures in physical culture and sport, see Grant, “The Politics of Physical Culture in the 1920s.”

^27. N. I. Podvoisky, “Lenin o fizicheskom vospitanii,” Krasnyi sport, 1940 in Uchenye zapiski. Vypusk 1 (Trudy kafedry marksizma-leninizma, Volgograd, 1969), 126.

^28.Demetr, Lenin ob okhrane, 57.

^29. For more discussion on this, see my chapter on young people in Physical Culture and Sport in Soviet Society.

^30.Zetkin, “Women, Marriage, and Sex.”

^31. From the journal Iunii kommunist, No. 8–9, 1922 in Rosenberg, Bolshevik Visions, 26.

^32. It must be noted that physical culture and sport were not the only targets of ‘Leninization’; the cult of Lenin was all-pervasive. Lenin and Leninism were so entangled that it was hard to separate the man from the ideology.

^33.Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, 467–75. Accessed July 19, 2013. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/06.htm

^34.Simpson, “Imag(in)ing Post-Revolutionary Evolution,” 236.

^35. “Rech' na s”ezde sovetov fizkul'tury 19 Aprelya 1924g,” in Trotsky L. Sochineniya kul'tura perekhodnogo perioda (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1927), 103.

^36.Bernstein, Burton, and Healey, Soviet Medicine.

^37. Kiaer, “The Swimming Vtorova Sisters: The Representation and Experience of Soviet Sport in the 1930s,” in Katzer et al., Euphoria and Exhaustion, 90.

^38. TsASPIM, f.3, op.49, d.23, l.58ob. My thanks to Judith Devlin for this reference.

^39. TsASPIM, f.3, op.49, d.67. l.71.

^40.Slivina, “Mastera – organizatory massovoi ucheby.”

^41. “V XX godovshchinu mezhdunarodnogo kommunisticheskogo zhenskogo dnya shlem plamennyi privet trudyashchimsya zhenshchinam! (Chto govoryat rabotnitsy o fizkul'ture),” Fizkul'tura i sport, no. 13 (1930): 4–5.

^42. For more detailed discussion of kul'turnost' and its associated advice literature in Soviet society, see Kelly, Refining Russia, Advice Literature, 230–311.

^43. Get Ready for Labour and Defence (Gotov k trudy i oborone) was a programme introduced in 1931 that sought involve as many people as possible in sport and physical culture by setting out different sports norms for them to pass. Eventually, different levels for different age groups and different levels of difficulty widened the breadth and focus of the programme.

^44. Spartakiads were the equivalent to the Olympics. There were grand national Spartakiads held every four years in Moscow but also smaller ones held on republic, regional and provincial levels.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Grant

Susan Grant is an Irish Research Council CARA/Marie Curie Co-fund Postdoctoral Fellow, University College Dublin and University of Toronto (2011–2014). She recently published her book, Sport and Physical Culture in Soviet Society: Propaganda, Acculturation, and Transformation in the 1920s and 1930s (New York and London: Routledge, 2012). Dr Grant's current project, for which she was awarded the postdoctoral fellowship, examines nursing in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1914–1941. Dr Grant held the 2012 Alice Fisher Fellowship at the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania. She is also a member of the UCD Centre for War Studies and a member of the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland.