Sport and Official Nationalism in Modern Russia

Abstract

How can one explain the recent fascination with sport as a tool of government policy in Russia?  This paper argues that sports policy in Russia is an essential part of policies to encourage nationalism and one which borrows heavily from the Soviet past.  Based on the analysis of meeting transcripts available on the Kremlin website and other materials, this paper argues that there are five key mechanisms by which the Kremlin uses the Soviet sport legacy to promote nationalism. This use of sport has implications for the popular reception of Putin’s regime.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 2016 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) meeting in Washington, DC. I thank Robert Orttung and Sufian Zhemukhov as well as members of the audience for the comments provided at that meeting. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments provided valuable feedback.

Notes

1. See, for instance, former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta’s, claim that “Putin’s main interest is to try and restore the old Soviet Union. I mean that’s what drives him” (cited in Mills 2016).

2. Likewise, the doping scandal at the Sochi 2014 Olympics suggests soft power was not the primary aim in holding such an event, as the government must have suspected that discovery of the doping scheme would jeopardize soft power gains.

3. Slavomir Horak observed that Aziada-2017, the Fifth Annual Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games, hosted by Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, in December, “although strategically justified by nationalist rhetoric, … [was] ultimately being organized for the external promotion of the country” (Horák 2017, 59).

4. Putin, of course, is well known for being a black belt in judo—a sport that he thanks for giving him “discipline” in his early life (Putin et al. 2000).

5. Manuel Veth (2015) has written that Kaliningrad may be dropped from the list of participating cities due to funding issues for the stadium, concerns over its legacy usage (the local team, Baltika Kaliningrad, is a failing team in Russia’s second division), and concerns over local infrastructure. Presumably at least part of the reason the region of Kaliningrad was included in the first place was due to concerns over the exclave’s position in the Russian Federation. If its departure from the list of host cities is confirmed, at least one way in which the World Cup promotes national unity will have been abandoned.

6. I thank Robert Orttung for suggesting this point to me.

7. See http://base.garant.ru/12157560/1/#block_100. Accessed July 22, 2016.

8. That is, “national sports take different forms and, in so doing, they provide us with important insights into the character of particular nations. Some national sports are peculiar to specific nations. As such they either confirm the exclusive character of the nation or, more commonly, reflect a contest between ethnic and civic representations of the nation” (Bairner 2001, 167). When sports invented in one nation receive a certain level of recognition from the international community and become internationally played, it marks a certain acceptance of a national culture.

9. Henry Hale’s work (2015, 270–-89) offers plausible reasons why this might be undertaken: In regimes marked by patronal politics, the leader’s popularity with the people acts as a sort of insurance against the possibility of elite defection from his patronage network. In all societies, sport is popular with the ordinary man, suggesting a prima facie rationale for attributing sporting success to Putin. Putin’s control over Russian politics is in no small way predicated on his genuine popularity with the people.

Additional information

Funding

Two trips to Russia related to this paper were financed by Muskingum University, to which the author owes thanks.