Download or read book The Olympic Games the Soviet Sports Bureaucracy and the Cold War written by Jenifer Parks and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-12-27 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using previously inaccessible archival documents, this study provides a longitudinal investigation of the middle levels of Soviet bureaucracy responsible for overseeing Olympic Sport during the Cold War. Spanning the period from the USSR’s Olympic debut in 1952 through the 1980 Games held in Moscow, this book argues that behind the high-profile performances of Soviet elite athletes, a legion of sports administrators worked within international sports organizations and the Soviet party-state to increase Soviet chances of success and make Soviet representatives a respected voice in international sports. Soviet officials helped expand the Olympic movement, increasing the participation of women, developing nations, and socialist bloc countries, while achieving Soviet political and diplomatic aims. Soviet representatives, over the course of only a few decades, became a dominant and respected voice within international sports circles, actively promoting Olympic ideals abroad even as they transformed those ideals to better align with Soviet goals. In the process, Soviet sports contributed to the evolution of Olympic sport, integrating the Soviet Union into an emerging global culture, and contributing to transformations within the Soviet Union. Back home in the USSR, the Sports Committee's leading personalities represented a new kind of Soviet bureaucrat, who emerged in the late years of Stalinism and contributed to the professionalization of party-state apparatus. Standing at the intersection between state and society, between Soviet political goals and their execution, and between Olympic sport and Communist ideology, mid-level Soviet sports administrators demonstrated ideological drive, political savvy, and professional pragmatism, providing the impetus, expertise, and experience to transform broad ideological constructs into specific policies and procedures in the Soviet Union and realize Soviet propaganda and foreign policy goals in international and Olympic sports.

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 Cold War Games written by Toby C Rider and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-05-30 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is the early Cold War. The Soviet Union appears to be in irresistible ascendance and moves to exploit the Olympic Games as a vehicle for promoting international communism. In response, the United States conceives a subtle, far-reaching psychological warfare campaign to blunt the Soviet advance. Drawing on newly declassified materials and archives, Toby C. Rider chronicles how the U.S. government used the Olympics to promote democracy and its own policy aims during the tense early phase of the Cold War. Rider shows how the government, though constrained by traditions against interference in the Games, eluded detection by cooperating with private groups, including secretly funded émigré organizations bent on liberating their home countries from Soviet control. At the same time, the United States utilized Olympic host cities as launching pads for hyping the American economic and political system. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the government attempted clandestine manipulation of the International Olympic Committee. Rider also details the campaigns that sent propaganda materials around the globe as the United States mobilized culture in general, and sports in particular, to fight the communist threat. Deeply researched and boldly argued, Cold War Games recovers an essential chapter in Olympic and postwar history.

Download or read book The Olympic Games and the Secret Cold War written by Toby Charles Rider and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and its East European satellites used international sport as a diplomatic tool to convince the world that communism was a vibrant and superior political ideology. This study explores the U.S. government’s effort to counter the communist “sports offensive.” In particular, it is demonstrated that the U.S. government harnessed the Olympic Games as a platform to wage a propaganda campaign against communist sport during the early years of the Cold War. Based on declassified documents and a range of previously unexamined archival material, this dissertation argues that the United States responded to the expansive post-war challenge of Soviet sport earlier, and far more aggressively, than previously acknowledged by scholarly examination. The response was not a replication of the state-directed Soviet sports system, but instigated through covert psychological warfare operations and overt propaganda distributed to the “free world.” From 1950 to 1960, the U.S. government took an unprecedented interest in international sport and the Olympic Games. In the lead up to, and during each Olympic festival, the U.S. information program sent waves of propaganda material across the globe to promote the American way of life and, by the same token, to denounce communism. It used the Olympic host cities as venues for a range of propaganda drives to advertise the American economic and political system; it also attempted to manipulate the International Olympic Committee in clandestine ways. The most prevalent aspect of many of these initiatives was the government’s cooperation with private groups, some of which were secretly funded émigré organizations bent on “liberating” the regimes of Eastern Europe from communism. While all of these efforts to utilize sport may have been less extensive than those pursued by the Soviet Union, they do provide further insights into how the U.S. government mobilized culture to conduct the Cold War.

Download or read book The Cold War and the 1984 Olympic Games written by Philip D’Agati and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-06-05 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soviet boycott of the 1984 Olympic Games is explained as the result of a complex series of events and policies that culminated in a strategic decision to not participate in Los Angeles. Using IR framework, D'Agati developes and argues for the concept of surrogate wars as an alternative means for conflict between states.

Download or read book Cold War Olympics written by Harry Blutstein and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-12-17 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The political tension of the Cold War bled into the Olympic Games when each side engaged in psychological warfare, exploiting sport for political ends. In Helsinki, the Soviet Union nearly overtook the United States in the medal count. Caught off guard, the U.S. hastened to respond, certain that the Soviets would use a victory at the next Olympics to broadcast their superiority over the Western world. Following the 1956 suppression of the Hungarian uprising, a Soviet athlete struck a Hungarian opponent in the Melbourne water polo semifinals, turning the pool red. The United States covertly encouraged Eastern Bloc athletes to defect, communist Chinese agents nearly succeeded in goading the Taiwanese government into withdrawing from the games, and a forbidden romance between an American and Czech athlete resulted in a politically complex marriage. This history describes those stories and more that resulted from the complicated relationship between Cold War politics and the Olympics.

Download or read book Venona written by John Earl Haynes and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1999-04-10 with total page 763 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking historical study reveals the shocking infiltration of Soviet spies in America—and the top-secret cryptography program that caught them. Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its own allies. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona messages—documents of unparalleled importance for our understanding of the history and politics of the Stalin era and the early Cold War years. Hidden in a former girls’ school in the late 1940s, Venona Project cryptanalysts, linguists, and mathematicians attempted to decode thousands of intercepted Soviet intelligence telegrams. When they cracked the Soviet code, analysts uncovered information of powerful significance: the first indication of Julius Rosenberg’s espionage efforts; references to the espionage activities of Alger Hiss; proof of Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project; evidence that spies had reached the highest levels of the U.S. State and Treasury Departments; indications that more than three hundred Americans had assisted in the Soviet theft of American secrets; and confirmation that the Communist party of the United States was consciously and willingly involved in Soviet espionage against America. Drawing not only on the Venona papers but also on newly opened Russian and U. S. archives, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr provide the most rigorously documented analysis ever written on Soviet espionage in the early Cold War years.

Download or read book Dropping the Torch written by Nicholas Evan Sarantakes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War offers a diplomatic history of the 1980 Olympic boycott. Broad in its focus, it looks at events in Washington, D.C., as well as the opposition to the boycott and how this attempted embargo affected the athletic contests in Moscow. Jimmy Carter based his foreign policy on assumptions that had fundamental flaws and reflected a superficial familiarity with the Olympic movement. These basic mistakes led to a campaign that failed to meet its basic mission objectives but did manage to insult the Soviets just enough to destroy détente and restart the Cold War. The book also includes a military history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which provoked the boycott, and an examination of the boycott's impact four years later at the Los Angeles Olympics, where the Soviet Union retaliated with its own boycott.

Download or read book Owning the Olympics written by Monroe Price and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-12-10 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A major contribution to the study of global events in times of global media. Owning the Olympics tests the possibilities and limits of the concept of 'media events' by analyzing the mega-event of the information age: the Beijing Olympics. . . . A good read from cover to cover." —Guobin Yang, Associate Professor, Asian/Middle Eastern Cultures & Sociology, Barnard College, Columbia University From the moment they were announced, the Beijing Games were a major media event and the focus of intense scrutiny and speculation. In contrast to earlier such events, however, the Beijing Games are also unfolding in a newly volatile global media environment that is no longer monopolized by broadcast media. The dramatic expansion of media outlets and the growth of mobile communications technology have changed the nature of media events, making it significantly more difficult to regulate them or control their meaning. This volatility is reflected in the multiple, well-publicized controversies characterizing the run-up to Beijing 2008. According to many Western commentators, the People's Republic of China seized the Olympics as an opportunity to reinvent itself as the "New China"---a global leader in economics, technology, and environmental issues, with an improving human-rights record. But China's maneuverings have also been hotly contested by diverse global voices, including prominent human-rights advocates, all seeking to displace the official story of the Games. Bringing together a distinguished group of scholars from Chinese studies, human rights, media studies, law, and other fields, Owning the Olympics reveals how multiple entities---including the Chinese Communist Party itself---seek to influence and control the narratives through which the Beijing Games will be understood. digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

Download or read book Global Corruption Report Sport written by Transparency International and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-05 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sport is a global phenomenon engaging billions of people and generating annual revenues of more than US$ 145 billion. Problems in the governance of sports organisations, fixing of matches and staging of major sporting events have spurred action on many fronts. Yet attempts to stop corruption in sport are still at an early stage. The Global Corruption Report (GCR) on sport is the most comprehensive analysis of sports corruption to date. It consists of more than 60 contributions from leading experts in the fields of corruption and sport, from sports organisations, governments, multilateral institutions, sponsors, athletes, supporters, academia and the wider anti-corruption movement. This GCR provides essential analysis for understanding the corruption risks in sport, focusing on sports governance, the business of sport, planning of major events, and match-fixing. It highlights the significant work that has already been done and presents new approaches to strengthening integrity in sport. In addition to measuring transparency and accountability, the GCR gives priority to participation, from sponsors to athletes to supporters an essential to restoring trust in sport.

Download or read book Olympics in Conflict written by Lu Zhouxiang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second half of the twentieth century, the Olympics played an important role in the politics of the Cold War and was part of the conflicts between the Capitalist Block, the Socialist Block and Third World countries. The Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO) is one of the best examples of the politicization of sport and the Olympics in the Cold War era. From the 1980s onward, the Olympics has facilitated communication and cooperation between nations in the post–Cold War era and contributed to the formation of a new world order. In August 2016, the Games of the XXXI Olympiad were held in Rio de Janeiro, making Brazil the first South American country to host the Summer Olympics. This was widely regarded as a new landmark event in the history of the modern Olympic movement. From the GANEFO to Rio, the Olympic Games have witnessed the shifting balance in international politics and world economy. This book aims at understanding the transformation of the Olympics over the past decades and tries to explain how the Olympic movement played its part in world politics, the world economy and international relations against the background of the rise of developing countries. The chapters in this book were published as a special issue in The International Journal of the History of Sport.

Download or read book Buried Glory written by Istvan Hargittai and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chronicle of the lives of twelve notable and celebrated Soviet scientists from the Cold War era, a time of great scientific achievement in the USSR.

Download or read book Beyond Boycotts written by Philippe Vonnard and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-12-18 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sport during Cold War has recently begun to be studied in more depth. Some scholars have edited a book about the US and Soviet sport diplomacy and show ow the government of these two countries have used sport during this period, notably as a tool of "soft power" during the Olympic games. Our goal is to continue in this direction and to focus more on the sport field as a place of exchanges during the Cold War. Regarding this point, our aim is to show that there were events "beyond boycotts"many and that unknown connections existed inside sport. Morevoer, many actors were involved in these exchanges. Thus, it is important not only to focus on the action of States, but also on private actors (international sporting bodies and journalists), considering that they acted around sport (an "apolitic" field) as it was tool to maintain links between the two blocs. Our project offers a good opportunity for young scholars to present original research based on new materials (notably the use of institutional or personals archives). Morevoer, it is also a step forward with a view to conduct research within a global history paradigm, one that is still underused in sport academic fields.

Download or read book The Games A Global History of the Olympics written by David Goldblatt and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-07-26 with total page 755 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A people’s history of the Olympics.”—New York Times Book Review A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year The Games is best-selling sportswriter David Goldblatt’s sweeping, definitive history of the modern Olympics. Goldblatt brilliantly traces their history from the reinvention of the Games in Athens in 1896 to Rio in 2016, revealing how the Olympics developed into a global colossus and highlighting how they have been buffeted by (and affected by) domestic and international conflicts. Along the way, Goldblatt reveals the origins of beloved Olympic traditions (winners’ medals, the torch relay, the eternal flame) and popular events (gymnastics, alpine skiing, the marathon). And he delivers memorable portraits of Olympic icons from Jesse Owens to Nadia Comaneci, the Dream Team to Usain Bolt.

Download or read book My Soviet Youth written by Irina Rodríguez and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Putting on gas masks and learning how to shoot Kalashnikov rifles in grade school made Soviet children fear possible attack by Cold War enemies. But a more prosaic invasion of Colorado beetles in the 1980s turned out to be a far more real threat to Soviet families. Many had to master farming when the state, near its demise, no longer had the finances to pay salaries. One of the last generation of Soviet teenagers who tasted the political restrictions and propaganda, and the benefits and deficits of the communist state, the author recalls her early years in a Soviet school, a Young Pioneer inauguration ceremony, work on a collective farm, her family's plot of land and their fights against invasive insects, and her first breaths of post-Soviet freedom, which brought economic havoc and bitter disappointments, along with new hopes.

Download or read book The Battle for Peace in the Early Cold War written by Rachel Maria Hutchison and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Similar to the space race or nuclear arms race, Olympic competition was a battle between East and West in the Cold War. This thesis examines Soviet engagement in the 1952 Summer Olympics as a form of early Soviet cultural diplomacy and originally claims that Soviet propaganda portrayed the Cold War as a battle for peace. It also identifies the Soviet Union’s 1952 Olympic debut as a precursor to the Soviet Union’s engagement in international cultural diplomacy emerging in 1956. By analyzing publications of the Soviet press, this thesis argues that the Soviet Union aimed to prove the ideological supremacy of socialism not only through excellent athletic performances, but also by demonstrating the superior moral consciousness of Soviet athletes. To do so, the Soviet press applied its ‘peace offensive’ to sport and highlighted parallels between core tenants of Olympism and socialist ideology, such as egalitarianism and international friendship. Soviet newspapers lauded Soviet athletes as fierce defenders of the Olympic Games and invoked the memory of World War II to condemn the ‘capitalist perversion’ of sport by ‘warmongering’ Western nations—most commonly, these criticisms targeted the United States. The thesis then examines the depictions of individual Soviet athletes. Patriotic biographical sketches presented Soviet Olympians as hero athletes who exemplified the New Soviet Person. These inspirational depictions urged Soviet youth to pursue sport and mobilize for the battle for peace—that is, the Cold War. This research is increasingly relevant in 2022 following the Russian Federation’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as Russian media eerily presents a narrative of fascist aggression against Russian athletes.

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 404 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.