![Sample our Sports and Leisure journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5949/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Sports-Leisure.jpg"})
Abstract
Paying particular attention to political dynamics within the Eastern-bloc, this article seeks to outline the diplomatic context of what remains the most notorious episode of state-level doping in modern sport history: the cold war-era doping program run by the German Democratic Republic's Stasi national security police and intelligence organisation. To do so, it aims to integrate archival research on the subject with high-level geopolitical analysis. This approach offers more nuanced perspectives on the diplomatic meaning of sport and performance-enhancement in East Germany than is present in the existing literature.
Le Contexte Diplomatique du dopage en République Démocratique Allemande : une approche révisionniste
En prêtant plus particulièrement attention à la dynamique politique au sein du bloc soviétique, cet article cherche à décrire le contexte diplomatique de ce qui reste l'épisode le plus célèbre de dopage d'Etat dans l'histoire du sport moderne : le programme de dopage de la Guerre Froide diligenté par le service de sécurité nationale et d'intelligence de la République Démocratique Allemande : la Stasi. Pour se faire, il s'attache à intégrer la recherche d'archives sur le sujet et des analyses géopolitiques sophistiquées. Cette approche offre des perspectives sur la signification diplomatique du sport et de l'amélioration des performances en Allemagne de l'Est plus nuancées que celles qui sont présentes dans la littérature existante.
El contexto diplomático del dopaje en la antigua República Democrática Alemana: un análisis revisionista
Este artículo pretende analizar el contexto diplomático del que continúa siendo el episodio más notorio de dopaje patrocinado por el Estado en la historia del deporte moderno, el programa de dopaje de la época de la Guerra Fría organizado por la Stasi, el organismo de seguridad y espionaje nacional de la República Democrática Alemana, prestando especial atención a las dinámicas políticas en el seno del bloque oriental. Para ello combina investigación archivística sobre el tema con un análisis geopolítico de alto nivel. Esta aproximación presenta una perspectiva más matizada sobre la significación diplomática del deporte y de la mejora del rendimiento en la Alemania del Este que la que se ofrece en la literatura académica existente.
Der diplomatische Kontext des Dopings in der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik: eine revisionistische Untersuchung
Mit besonderem Augenmerk auf politische Kräftespiele innerhalb des Ostblocks strebt dieser Artikel an, den diplomatischen Kontext dessen, was der berüchtigtste Abschnitt von staatlichem Doping in der modernen Sportgeschichte bleibt, zu skizzieren: das Doping-Programm der Ära des Kalten Krieges, das von der nationalen Sicherheitspolizei und dem Geheimdienst der Stasi der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik durchgeführt wurde. Um dies zu tun, zielt er darauf ab, Archivforschung zu dem Thema sowie eine hochrangige geopolitische Analyse miteinander zu verbinden. Dieser Ansatz bietet nuanciertere Perspektiven auf die diplomatische Bedeutung des Sports und der Leistungssteigerung in Ostdeutschland als bislang in der bestehenden Literatur verfügbar ist.
Keywords:
Palabras clave:
Schlüsselwörter:
Notes
1. Churchill, ‘The Sinews of Peace’, 7290. See, for an overview of the larger context of this speech, Harbutt, The Iron Curtain.
2. See Selverstone, Constructing the Monolith; Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment; Leffler, A Preponderance of Power; and Leffler, The Specter of Communism. On the Soviet Union's place in this history, consult Mastny, Russia's Road to the Cold War.
3. ‘NSC 68’, 235–92. Useful overviews of this seminal document include: May, American Cold War Strategy; Hammond, ‘NSC-68’; Wells Jr., ‘Sounding the Tocsin’; and Casey, ‘Selling NSC-68’. For an interesting argument that NSC 68 was a product of concerns over the domestic US economy rather than one produced by geopolitical fears of the Soviet Union, see Cardwell, NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War.
4. Reagan, ‘Remarks at the Annual Convention’. For an insightful examination regarding how such rhetoric played out on the matter of doping in sport, see Dimeo, ‘Good versus Evil?’. Another interesting perspective is provided in Beamish and Ritchie, ‘Totalitarian Regimes and Cold War Sport’.
5. ‘NSC 68’, 263.
6. Nixon, ‘The Kitchen Debate’. A useful chapter on the subject entitled, ‘Nixon in Moscow: Appliances, Affluence, and Americanism’, is provided in Marling, As Seen on TV, 242–83. For a series of essays that collectively provide a broader overview of the meaning of household kitchens in the cold war, consult Oldenziel and Zachmann, Cold War Kitchen.
7. See, among others, Torres and Dyreson, ‘The Cold War Games’; Hunt, ‘American Sport Policy’; Hunt, ‘Countering the Soviet Threat’; and Sarantakes, Dropping the Torch.
8. An astute analysis of how the United States sought to combat the employment of sport by the Soviet Union for propaganda purposes is provided in Rider, ‘The Olympic Games and the Secret Cold War’.
9. Washburn, ‘Sport as a Soviet Tool’, 496, 499.
10. For the entirety of the article, see Ibid., 490–99.
11. See Dragomir, ‘The Perceived Threat of Hegemonism’.
12. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc, ix.
13. For recent works by diplomatic historians that emphasise fragmentation within the communist world, see Sarotte, Dealing with the Devil; Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall; and Christensen, Worse than a Monolith. A representative statement on how sport historians have addressed the subject is provided in an introductory passage to a recent overview of Eastern-bloc sport during the cold war by Miklós Hadas: ‘European socialist countries achieved outstanding Olympic and international sport records. Their achievements were the direct result of centrally monitored sport systems allowing for the construction of sporting facilities, talent identification, coaching-related knowledge transfer, social rewards (both in the form of prestige and money) and, on occasion, centrally administered illegal performance enhancing practices. … These symbolic (over-)investments [in sport] were implemented to express poliitico-ideological superiority over the Western world, especially the USA’. Hadas, ‘The Olympics and the Cold War’, 106–7. To be fair to Hadas, other sections of this work do note the presence of intra-Eastern-bloc tensions regarding sport. For other exceptions to the prevailing trend in the literature on sport during the cold war, consult the series of essays published in a 2009 special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport edited by Terret (26, no. 4) dedicated to cold war sport on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. For a helpful overview regarding the complexities of the subject, see in particular Terret's introduction to the issue, ‘Sport in Eastern Europe during the Cold War’, 465–8. See also Edelman, Serious Fun; and Edelman, Spartak Moscow. It should be said, however, that Edelman's works focus on domestic Soviet sport rather than the international dynamics of communist-bloc athletics.
14. Emphasis added by the authors of this article. Ungerleider, Faust's Gold, 54. For other analyses concerning the GDR doping program, see Dimeo, Hunt, and Horbury, ‘The Individual and the State’; and Dimeo and Hunt, ‘The Doping of Elite Athletes in the Former East Germany’.
15. Emphasis added by the authors of this article. Rosen, Dope, 97.
16. Though its archival support of its passages on the subject is limited, a rare exception to the prevailing historiography is provided in Dennis and Drix, Sport under Communism. ‘Although the clash between imperialism and communism drove ideological rivals into the search for Faust's gold’, Dennis and Drix write, ‘another motive should not be overlooked, that is, the competition for status within the communist world between states that were supposedly bound together by fraternal friendship but were often divided by matters relating to economic advantage, competing notions of cultural pre-eminence and of Marxist-Leninist rectitude, and divided histories’ (89–90).
17. Although the work says relatively little about doping, a recent, noteworthy work on German sport during the cold war by Balbier emphasises Soviet–East German collaboration: ‘“A Game, a Competition, an Instrument?”’.
18. See Parks, ‘Verbal Gymnastics’.
19. Zhdanov quoted in Roberts and Olson, Winning Is the Only Thing, 13. Hunt also quotes Zhdanov from this text in ‘Countering the Soviet Threat’, 811.
20. Quoted in Cole, ‘The East German Sports System’, 27.
21. Talaev quoted in Riordan, ‘Soviet Sport and Soviet Foreign Policy’, 322. Riordan's citation to the original work is: Yu. A. Talaev, ‘“Sport – Oblast” mirnogo sorevnovaniya’, Teoriya i praktika fizícheskoi kul'tury, 1973, no. 1, 8.
22. A March 1970 Stasi memorandum on the degree of harmony shown by competitors from the Soviet-bloc at a sporting event held earlier that year provides a revealing insight on this point. ‘The athletes from socialist countries did not present a unified front’, the report stated simply.
23. See, for a rare work that mentions sport in regard to Eastern European attempts (even if only minor in scope) to circumvent Soviet control, Girginov, ‘Bulgarian Sport Policy 1945–1989’. In that article, Girginov writes, ‘All significant sport projects were in line with the party's programme for socialism, but some represented an attempt at a break with Soviet domination’ (531).
24. ‘Memorandum for the President's File’, 945.
25. On the 1953 uprising and its diplomatic context, consult Ostermann, Uprising in East Germany, 1953.
26. Sarotte, Dealing with the Devil, 3.
27. This subject is briefly discussed in Hunt, Drug Games, 2–3, 51–3.
28. On the 1956 Hungarian revolt, consult Gati, Failed Illusions.
29. Consult on the event, Rinehart, ‘“Fists Flew and Blood Flowed”’; and Rinehart, ‘Cold War Expatriate Sport’.
30. See Fishman, ‘“You’re Not Czech if You're Not Jumping Up and Down!”’.
31. Central Intelligence Agency, ‘Instability and Change in Soviet Dominated Eastern Europe: An Intelligence Assessment’, December 1982 (Available online through the CIA Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room: http://www.foia.cia.gov/).
32. Emphasis added. Pataki and Holden, Winning Secrets, 166–7. This quote can also be found in Hunt, Drug Games, 53.
33. See, on the system used to produce the GDR's unprecedented sporting success, Cole, ‘The East German Sports System’.
34. Second Lieutenant Morganstern [first name unmentioned], Meeting Report, GI ‘Technik’, Time: 23 January 1968, 2:00 pm, Location: Berlin, Dr. Steven Ungerleider GDR Collection in honour of Professor Werner Franke and Brigitte Berendonk, Texas Program in Sports Media, College of Communications, University of Texas at Austin [hereafter: Ungerleider Papers].
35. Several scholars have noted the GDR's use of sport for the purpose of creating a greater sense of national identity. See, for example, Magdalinski, ‘Sport History and East German National Identity’; and Anderson, ‘Soccer and the Failure of East German Sports Policy’.
36. Lieutenant Neudel [first name unmentioned], Meeting Report, Source: IMS ‘Technik’, Time: 15 December 1970, 11:00 am–1:00 pm, Location: IMK ‘Mühle’, Ungerleider Papers.
37. These efforts began well before the GDR doping program was initiated in the 1970s. See, for a fascinating work on a West German attempt during the previous decade to ease cold war tensions through a proposal to jointly host an Olympic Games with the GDR, Cary, ‘Olympics in Divided Berlin?’.
38. Such attempts constitute an interesting twist in the larger diplomatic history of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Beginning in 1969, the FRG endeavoured to reduce tensions with the East. Known as Ostpolitik, this strategy emphasised the need to come to some sort of understanding with the USSR. In 1970, the FRG and the Soviet Union signed the Treaty of Moscow, which renounced the use of force between the two countries and recognised the European territorial borders that arose after the Second World War as legally inviolable. In light of these underlying dynamics, the fact that the FRG attempted to create tension between the GDR and the USSR on the subject of East German sporting success is somewhat surprising. On the 1970 Treaty of Moscow, consult Von Dannenberg, The Foundations of Ostpolitik.
39. Meeting Report, Source: IMS ‘Technik’, Time: 26 October 1970, 1:00–3:30 pm, Location: IMK ‘Mule’, Ungerleider Papers.
40. Meeting Report, Source: IMV1 ‘Technik’ Time: 26 April 1977, 12:30–3:00 pm Location: IMK2 ‘Norbert’, Ungerleider Papers.
41. For a thoughtful examination of Moscow's selection as the host of the competitions (which emphasises American attempts to prevent it), consult Sarantakes, ‘Moscow versus Los Angeles’. On the Moscow Games, see also: Booker, The Games War; Hulme, The Political Olympics; and Sarantakes, Dropping the Torch.
42. Klyov quoted in Bill Shirley, ‘Drug Testers Ready: Only a Dope Would Try It at Olympics’, Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1980, D1.
43. On the doping efforts in Moscow, see Hunt, Drug Games, 65–6. De Merode quoted on p. 66.
44. ‘Soviet Sports Failures Kick Off Purge’, Ottawa Citizen (Weekend Observer), February 4, 1984, 24. This report is a translated copy of a Germany-language article published in the West German magazine Der Spiegel.
45. Ueberroth quoted in Reich, Making it Happen, 222. In a brief passage that mentions Soviet fears of GDR sporting success as a potential causal factor behind the 1984 Olympic boycott, Hunt also quotes Ueberroth from this text (Drug Games, 74).
46. See Howard A. Tyner, ‘U.S. Olympic Boycott of 1980 Led to Soviet Decision of 1984’, Chicago Tribune, D13.