Download or read book Sport in the USSR written by Mike O'Mahony and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2006-06-15 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sport played a vital role within the social and cultural life of the Soviet Union. The Soviet State sponsored countless programmes to promote sporting activities, and even constructed a new term, fizkultura, to describe sports culture. In Sport in the USSR, Mike O'Mahony asserts that the popular image of fizkultura was as dependent on presentation as it was on actual practice. Images of vigorous Soviet sportsmen and women were evoked in literature, film and popular songs, and adorned stamps and domestic objects, as well as badges and medals. Some major artists even forged their entire careers from representations of sport." "Sport in the USSR explores physical and visual culture from the early years of the Soviet Union to its collapse. It is a fascinating addition to the current debates in the fields of sociology, visual culture and Soviet history."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Sports History written by Robert Edelman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Practiced and watched by billions, sport is a global phenomenon. Sport history is a burgeoning sub-field that explores sport in all forms to help answer fundamental questions that scholars examine. This volume provides a reference for sport scholars and an accessible introduction to those who are new to the sub-field.
Download or read book Physical Culture and Sport in Soviet Society written by Susan Grant and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its very inception the Soviet state valued the merits and benefits of physical culture, which included not only sport but also health, hygiene, education, labour and defence. Physical culture propaganda was directed at the Soviet population, and even more particularly at young people, women and peasants, with the aim of transforming them into ideal citizens. By using physical culture and sport to assess social, cultural and political developments within the Soviet Union, this book provides a new addition to the historiography of the 1920s and 1930s as well as to general sports history studies.
Download or read book The Whole World Was Watching written by Robert Edelman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Cold War era, the confrontation between capitalism and communism played out not only in military, diplomatic, and political contexts, but also in the realm of culture—and perhaps nowhere more so than the cultural phenomenon of sports, where the symbolic capital of athletic endeavor held up a mirror to the global contest for the sympathies of citizens worldwide. The Whole World Was Watching examines Cold War rivalries through the lens of sporting activities and competitions across Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the U.S. The essays in this volume consider sport as a vital sphere for understanding the complex geopolitics and cultural politics of the time, not just in terms of commerce and celebrity, but also with respect to shifting notions of race, class, and gender. Including contributions from an international lineup of historians, this volume suggests that the analysis of sport provides a valuable lens for understanding both how individuals experienced the Cold War in their daily lives, and how sports culture in turn influenced politics and diplomatic relations.
Download or read book The Olympic Games the Soviet Sports Bureaucracy and the Cold War written by Jenifer Parks and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the Soviet bureaucracy responsible for overseeing Olympic sport during the Cold War. It analyzes how sport administrators used political savvy and professional pragmatism alongside ideological drive to expand participation, maximize chances of success, and achieve Soviet political and diplomatic aims.
Download or read book Euphoria and Exhaustion written by Nikolaus Katzer and published by Campus Verlag. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The architects of the Soviet Union intended not merely to remake their society--they also had an ambitious plan to remake the citizenry physically, with the goal of perfecting the socialist ideal of man. As Euphoria and Exhaustionshows, the Soviet leadership used sport as one of the primary arenas in which to deploy and test their efforts to mechanize and perfect the human body, drawing on knowledge from physiology, biology, medicine, and hygiene. At the same time, however, such efforts, like any form of social control, could easily lead to discontent--and thus, the editors show, a study of changes in public attitude towards sport can offer insight into overall levels of integration, dissatisfaction, and social exhaustion in the Soviet Union.
Download or read book Defending the American Way of Life written by Kevin B. Witherspoon and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2019 NASSH Book Award, Anthology. The Cold War was fought in every corner of society, including in the sport and entertainment industries. Recognizing the importance of culture in the battle for hearts and minds, the United States, like the Soviet Union, attempted to win the favor of citizens in nonaligned states through the soft power of sport. Athletes became de facto ambassadors of US interests, their wins and losses serving as emblems of broader efforts to shield American culture—both at home and abroad—against communism. In Defending the American Way of Life, leading sport historians present new perspectives on high-profile issues in this era of sport history alongside research drawn from previously untapped archival sources to highlight the ways that sports influenced and were influenced by Cold War politics. Surveying the significance of sports in Cold War America through lenses of race, gender, diplomacy, cultural infiltration, anti-communist hysteria, doping, state intervention, and more, this collection illustrates how this conflict remains relevant to US sporting institutions, organizations, and ideologies today.
Download or read book East Plays West written by Stephen Wagg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cold War spanned some five decades from the devastation that remained after World War Two until the fall of the Berlin wall, and for much of that time the perception was that only on the Eastern side were politics and sport inextricably linked. However, this assumption underestimates the extent to which sport was an important symbol for both power blocs in their ongoing ideological struggle. This collection of essays from leading international authorities on sport, culture and ideology brings together an impressive body of work organized around key political themes and outstanding moments in sport, and is at once a political history of sport and an illuminating new perspective on the forces that shaped this unsettled time.
Download or read book Secrets of Soviet Sports Fitness and Training written by Michael Yessis and published by Quill. This book was released on 1988 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sport and the European Avant Garde 1900 1945 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-02-07 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays assesses the significance of sport for the European avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century from an international and interdisciplinary perspective. It shows the extent to which avant-garde art and culture was shaped by the dynamic encounter with modern sports.
Download or read book Serious Fun written by Robert Edelman and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Big Red Machine," an assemblyline of sober, unsmiling Olympic champions--this was the image that dominated Western thinking about Soviet sports. But for Soviet citizens the experience of watching sports in the USSR was always very different. Soviet spectators paid comparatively little attention to most Olympic sports. They flocked instead to the games they really wanted to watch, rooted for teams and heroes of their own choosing, and carried on with a rowdiness typical of sportsfans everywhere. The Communist state sought to use sports and other forms of mass culture to instill values of discipline, order, health, and culture. The fans, however, just wanted to have fun. Official Soviet ideology was never able to control or comprehend the regressed and pleasure-seeking component not only of spectator sport but of all popular culture. In Serious Fun, Robert Edelman provides the first history of any aspect of Soviet sports, covering the most popular spectator attractions from 1917 up to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Edelman has used the highly candid sports press, memoirs, instruction books, team yearbooks, and press guides and supplmented them with Soviet television broadcasts and interviews with players, coaches, team officials, television bureaucrats, journalists, and fans to detail how spectator sport withstood the power of the state and became a sphere of life that allowed citizens to resist, deflect, and even modify the actions of the authorities. Focusing on the most popular sports of soccer, hockey, and basketball, Edelman discusses the dominant teams and the biggest stars: the international competitive successes as well as the many failures. He covers a variety of topics familiar to Western sports fans including professionalism, fan violence, corruption, political meddling, the sports press, television, and the effect of big money on competition. More than just a sports book, Serious Fun takes us deep into the social fabric of Soviet life. Edelman shows how the Big Red machine so visible in international competition was much like the giant steel mills and dams of which the Soviets boasted. These were the achievements of a state that put production above all else, but spectator sport was part of a long-suffering consumer sector that the industrial giant would never satisfy. This volume will bring a broader, richer understanding of Soviet life not only to students of popular culture and Russian history but to sports fans everywhere.
Download or read book Sport and Political Ideology written by John Hoberman and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the modern political spectrum, left-wing and right-wing political theorists have invested sport with ideological significance. That significance, however, varies distinctively and characteristically with the ideology—a phenomenon John Hoberman terms "ideological differentiation." Taking this phenomenon as its point of departure, this provocative work interprets the major sport ideologies of the twentieth century as distinct expressions of political doctrine. Hoberman argues that a political ideology's interpretation of sport is shaped in part by the value it assigns to work and play as modes of experience; the political anthropologies of right and left can be distinguished by examining their resistance to—or affinity for—sportive imagery of their leaders and of the state itself; there exists a fascist temperament that shows an affinity to athleticism and the sphere of the body that is not shared by the left. Tracing modern sport ideology back to its premodern antecedents, Hoberman examines the interpretations of sport that have been promulgated by European political intellectuals, such as cultural conservatives and contemporary neo-Marxists, and by the official ideologists of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, and China before and after Mao. As a form of mass theater, sport can advertise any ideology. But the deeper relationship between sport and political ideology has never before been explored wth such vigor. Presenting the first general theory of sport and political ideology to appear in any language, Hoberman's groundbreaking work is a unique and invaluable contribution to the intellectual and political history of sport in the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Olympics and the Cold War 1948 1968 written by Erin Elizabeth Redihan and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Olympic athletes, fans and the media alike, the games bring out the best sport has to offer--unity, patriotism, friendly competition and the potential for stunning upsets. Yet wherever international competition occurs, politics are never far removed. Early in the Cold War, when all U.S.-Soviet interactions were treated as potential matters of life and death, each side tried to manipulate the International Olympic Committee. Despite the IOC's efforts to keep the games apolitical, they were quickly drawn into the superpowers' global struggle for supremacy, with medal counts the ultimate prize. Based on IOC, U.S. government and contemporary media sources, this book looks at six consecutive Olympiads to show how high the stakes became once the Soviets began competing in 1952, threatening America's athletic supremacy.
Download or read book Diplomatic Games written by Heather L. Dichter and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How events like the Olympics and World Cup have affected international relations: “A significant contribution to historical knowledge and understanding.” ?Peter J. Beck, author of Scoring for Britain International sporting events, including the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup, have experienced profound growth in popularity and significance since the mid-twentieth century. Sports often facilitate diplomacy, revealing common interests across borders and uniting groups of people who are otherwise divided by history, ethnicity, or politics. In many countries, popular athletes have become diplomatic envoys. Sport is an arena in which international conflict and compromise find expression, yet the impact of sports on foreign relations has not been widely studied by scholars. In Diplomatic Games, a team of international scholars examines how the nexus of sports and foreign relations has driven political and cultural change since 1945, demonstrating how governments have used athletic competition to maintain and strengthen alliances, promote policies, and increase national prestige. The contributors investigate topics such as China’s use of sports to oppose Western imperialism, the ways in which sports helped bring an end to apartheid in South Africa, and the impact of the United States’ 1980 Olympic boycott on US-Soviet relations. Bringing together innovative scholarship from around the globe, this groundbreaking collection makes a compelling case for the use of sport as a lens through which to view international relations.
Download or read book Football Dynamo written by Marc Bennetts and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-03-05 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1991, the collapse of the USSR seemed to signal the death of the Russian football industry, as the money, the players and the fans left. But now the oligarchs who profited from the post-Soviet turmoil are supporting the nation's football clubs and their dreams of glory, resulting in unprecedented success. Along this journey into the heart of Russian football, Marc Bennetts meets the managers, oligarchs, players, pundits and fans that define the Russian Premier league, now the fastest-growing and most intriguing football league in the world. From Andrei Arshavin and the national team's adventures at Euro 2008 to the symbolism of a club from war-torn Chechnya lifting the Russian FA Cup, Football Dynamo uncovers shocking revelations about corruption, hooliganism and racism, but also the true beauty of the game and the country.
Download or read book Secrets of Russian Sports Fitness and Training written by Michael Yessis and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Secrets of Soviet Sports Fitness and Training, published in 1987, tells the story of Soviet sports success in the Olympic Games and World championships. It describes the key factors of the Soviet system of training athletes -- a system that is still unsurpassed by any country in the world -- not even after the country was dismantled. Now, after 21 years, an updated version of this book is available. In addition to the original, an addendum has been added to each chapter to bring it up to date with the advances that have been made since the first printing. More information from practicing Russian coaches as well as from the literature has been included. Also added are results from application of Russian methods by coaches who have incorporated one or more aspects of their system.
