The five hats of Nina Ponomareva: sport, shoplifting and the Cold War

Abstract

The 1956 arrest in London of the Soviet Olympic discus champion, Nina Ponomareva, for shoplifting five hats worth one pound became a major international incident. Initially, both sides followed familiar Cold War scripts. The Soviets demanded the charges be dropped, but the British refused to do so. Ponomareva went into hiding at the Soviet embassy. The matter was front page news the world over. Six weeks passed before it was resolved. This minor confrontation demonstrated both the tenacity of Cold War rhetoric and the ultimate ability of the two sides to find compromise.

Keywords:

• Olympics
• USSR
• Britain
• shoplifting
• Cold War
• Suez Crisis
• Ponomareva

Notes

¹ Sport is largely ignored in the Cold War foreign relations literature. With the exception Nicholas Sarantakes, those who have studied the international system briefly refer to the Olympic boycotts of 1980 and 1984 but little else. See Sarantakes, Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, The Olympic Boycott and the Cold War, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Among works on the international system see, Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); John Gaddis, The Cold War: a new history, (New York: Penguin, 2005); Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945–2006, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008) tenth edition; Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, The Soviet Union and the Cold War, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Frederik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, (New York: Random House, 2013); Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). See also, Westad and Leffler, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, 3 vols., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

² On liminality see Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982). The classic texts on the symbolic meaning of play are Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 412–453 and Johan Huzinga, Homo Ludens: a study of the play element in culture, (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1970).

³ Musada Hajimu, Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 2.; Joseph Nye, Jr., The Future of Power, (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), pp. 3–24, 81–109. With the exceptions of Toby Rider and David Caute, the strand of Cold War scholarship which has examined culture has stressed the arts and letters. See David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998); Anne Gorsuch, All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); France Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, (New York: The New Press, 1999); Toby Rider, Cold War Games: Propaganda, the Olympics and U.S. Foreign Policy, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016); Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Homefront: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Tony Shaw and Denise Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010); Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

⁴ Interview with Nina Ponomareva, Moscow, 6 February 2015, www.sportexpress.ru/fridays/reviews/835630, accessed 20 September 2015.

⁵ See newsreel accounts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-aT8R3fqqc and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JMww7paTUw. https://www.youtube.com, accessed 26 May 2015.

⁶ Pravda, 9/1/56; Sovetskii sport, 5 September 1956.

⁷ David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 472–474.

⁸ Soviet Woman Athlete Eludes Police in London, New York Times, 31 August 1956.

⁹ On lesbians and males masquerading as females, see Ponomareva’s interview and that of Galina Zybina, winner of the shotput at Helsinki: Interview with Galina Zybina, St. Petersburg, 24 July 2015, www.sport-express.ru/fridays/reviews/899542 accessed 25 September 2015. Both Zybina and Ponomareva stated that many female athletes shared domiciles, and several showered away from the rest of the team.

¹⁰ http://www.smsport.ru/expo/katalog/legatlet/otkalenko/6.php, accessed July 2015; Interview with Nina Ponomareva.

¹¹ State Archive of the Russian Federation (hereafter GARF), f. 7576, о. 29, d. 175, ll. 175–186. Thanks to Sylvain Dufraisse for sharing this and other documents with me.

¹² Andrei Starostin, Flagman futbola, (Moscow: Molodaia gvardia, 1988), pp. 72–73.

¹³ Between 1946 and 1952, with the exception of the 1952 Olympics, delegations of Soviet athletes and sports officials journeyed to Austria, Pravda, 9 May and 25 October 1952; France, Pravda, 11 November 1946, 24 February 1947, 20 March and 5 May 1951, 12 March 1952; Sweden Pravda, 21 October 1947, 25 October 1950, 25 January 1951; Norway, Pravda, 4 February 1946, 11 October 1950, 10 February 1952; Finland, Pravda, 1 July 1946, 2 July 1947, 18 November 1949, 1 June 1951, 28 February 1952, 30 June 1952; and the United States, Pravda, 2 March 1950. On the distinction between tourism before and after 1953 see Gorsuch, p. 47 as well as pp. 2, 10, 62, 93–7, 127–129, 133, 158–9. While sporting delegations were a different bureaucratic category from tourists, they did shop much like tourists.

¹⁴ This and all other British documents are drawn from three large files at the British National Archive (hereafter NAUK), Home Office (hereafter HO) 291/239 944947, Police report of Ponomareva arrest, 30 August 1956 and 31 August 1956.

¹⁵ BNA, Foreign Office (hereafter FO) 371 /122983 631070, Note of Thomas Brimelow, 31 August 1956.

¹⁶ Pravda, 1 September 1956. Sovestkii sport, 5 September 1956. New York Times, 1 September 1956.

¹⁷ GARF (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv, Rossiskoi Federatsii), 7576, o. d. 175, ll. 187–190, copy of letter from Ponomareva to central commitee.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Evening Standard, 30 August 1956; Pravda, 1 September 1956; Sovetskii sport, 1 September 1956.

²⁰ Pravda, 1 September 1956.

²¹ On Malik, see his obituary, Washington Post, 13 February 1980; Interview, Nina Ponomareva. Sixty years after the event, Ponomareva asserted that the order for these steps came from Khrushchev. No sign of this appears in any contemporaneous source.

²² Peter Beck, ‘Britain and the Cold War’s ‘Cultural Olympics’: Responding to the Political Drive of Soviet Sport’, Contemporary British History, 2005, 19:2, pp. 169–185.

²³ Ministerstvo Inostrannykh Del (hereafter MID) f. 162, 1956, o. 33, papka 80, d. 2, l. 136, Letter from Roshchin to Foreign Ministry.

²⁴ BNA, FO 371/122983 631070, Report of Lord Reading, 30 August 1956.

²⁵ MID, f.022, o. 9, papka 134, d. 47, ll. 41–42, Report from Roshchin to Foreign Ministry. 30 August 1956.

²⁶ BNA, FO 371 122983 631070, letter from Amy Ballard to Lord Reading, 31 August 1956. While underlings were known to write in acknowledgement of such letters, there is no evidence that they were read by their addressees.

²⁷ BNA, FO 371 / 122983 631070, letter from Kathleen Wilson to Foreign Office, 5 September 1956.

²⁸ BNA, HO 291 / 239 944947, letter from Robert Thompson to Home Office, 5 September 1956.

²⁹ BNA, FO 371/122983 631070, Report of Lord Reading, 31 August 1956. This file contains a clipping from the Daily Worker.

³⁰ Birmingham Post, 1 September 1956.

³¹ Washington Post, 3 September 1956.

³² Los Angeles Times, 4 September 1956.

³³ Chicago Tribune, 5 September 1956.

³⁴ Washington Post, 5 September 1956.

³⁵ Washington Post, 1 September 1956.

³⁶ New York Times, 23 September 1956.

³⁷ Sovetskii sport, 8 September 1956 and 11 September 1956; New York Times, 11 September 1956.

³⁸ New York Times, 22 September 1956 and 28 September 1956. See also Caute, The Dancer Defects, p. 474.

³⁹ BNA, HO 291 /239 944947, Report from, N. Parrot to Foreign Office, 12 September 1956.

⁴⁰ BNA, FO 371 /122987 631070, Foreign Office to Moscow Embassy, 15 September 1956.

⁴¹ BNA, HO 291 /239 944947, Foreign Office to Moscow Embassy, 19 September 1956. Roshchin wanted to know when a decision would be made.

⁴² Ibid., letter Frank Newsam to Ivonne Kirkpatrik, 19 September 1956.

⁴³ Sovetskii sport, 15 September 1956.

⁴⁴ Birmingham Post, 15 September 1956.

⁴⁵ New York Times, 21 September 1956.

⁴⁶ BNA, FO 371 122983 631070, letter from Daria Homes, Nottingham to Foreign Office, 23 September 1956.

⁴⁷ Ibid., letter from Peter Vening to Selwyn Lloyd, 22 September 1956.

⁴⁸ Ibid., letter from Charles Blackmore to Home Office, 22 September 1956.

⁴⁹ Daily Mail, 22 September 1956.

⁵⁰ BNA, FO 371 122983 631070, letter from B.O. Druce to Home Office, 25 September 1956.

⁵¹ BNA, PREM 11/1240 C644927, letter from Attorney General to Prime Minister, 24 September 1956.

⁵² Chicago Tribune, 28 September 1956; New York Times, 28 September 1956; The Times of India, 28 September 1956.

⁵³ As a minister, Mikhailov outranked vice minister Gromyko. MID (Arkhiv Ministerstvo Inostrannykh Del), f .022, o. 9, papki 134, d. 47, l. 56. Report from MID to Central Committee, 19 September 1956.

⁵⁴ Manchester Guardian, 28 September 1956. The dispatch was signed ‘A student of Soviet Affairs’.

⁵⁵ BNA, PREM 11/1240, C644927, letter from A. Nutting to Anthony Eden, 21 September 1956.

⁵⁶ RGANI (Rossiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii), f. 5, o. 30, d. 173, ll. 127–129, report from Mikhailov to Central Committee, 28 September 1956.

⁵⁷ BNA, HO 291/239 944947, Parrot to Foreign Office, 21 September 1956.

⁵⁸ Ibid., report from Parrott to Foreign Office, 26 September 1956.

⁵⁹ BNA, PREM 11/1240 C644927, report from Foreign Office to William Hayter Moscow embassy, 27 September 1956.

⁶⁰ MID, f.022, o. 9, papki 134, d. 47, l. 51, report from Gromyko to Central Committee of CPSU, 20 September 1956.

⁶¹ Ibid.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ Ibid., l. 63

⁶⁴ On the Thaw see Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, (Armon: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 151- 201; Stephen Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 1–18.

⁶⁵ BNA, HO 291 /239 944947, report from Parrott to Foreign Office, 28 September 1956. Mikhailov’s report to the Central Committee confirmed Parrot’s account. See RGANI, f. 5, o. 30, d. 173, ll. 127-129.

⁶⁶ BNA, HO 291 /239 944947, Memorandum, author unnamed, 11 October 1956; Evening Standard, 3 October 1956; Daily Mail, 3 October 1956; Manchester Guardian, 4 October 1956.

⁶⁷ MID, f. 022, o. 9, papka 134, d.47, l. 66, report from Gromyko to Central Committee. 24 September 1956.

⁶⁸ BNA, HO 291/ 239 944947, letter from Shawcross to Nutting, 4 October 1956.

⁶⁹ Ibid., report from Nutting to Home Office, 5 October 1956.

⁷⁰ Ibid., letter from A.W. Peterson to Thomas Brimelow, 10 October 1956.

⁷¹ Glasgow Herald, 10 October 1956.

⁷² BNA, HO 291/ 239 944947, clipping from unnamed newspaper, 13 October 1956; The Times of India, 13 October 1956; Los Angeles Times, 13 October 1956; Chicago Tribune, 13 October 1956; New York Times, 13 October 1956; The Scotsman, 13 October 1956.

⁷³ New York Times, 16 October 1956.

⁷⁴ Interview with Nina Ponomaerva.

⁷⁵ http://www.smsport.ru/expo/katalog/legatlet/otkalenko/; V.L. Shteinbakh, Bol’shaya Olimpiskaya Entsiklopedia, vol. 2. (Moscow: Olympia Press, 2006), p. 518.

⁷⁶ Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War, From Stalin to Gorbachev, (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2007), p. 114.

⁷⁷ Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, (Penguin: New York, 2005), p. 301.

⁷⁸ On the Hungarian episode at Melbourne, see Toby Rider, Cold War Games, Propaganda, the Olympics and U.S. Foreign Policy, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), p. 104.