Playing to New Rules: Soviet Sport and Perestroika

Abstract

During the 1980s radical changes began to appear in communist sport, thereby breaking the mould of its functionalised and bureaucratic (planfulfilment) structure. Until then not only had the Soviet-pioneered, statecontrolled, utilitarian system hampered a true appraisal of realities that lay beneath the ‘universal’ statistics and ‘idealised’ veneer, it had prevented concessions to particular groups in the population — the ‘we know what’s good for you’ syndrome by which men tell women what sports they should play; the fit tell the disabled that sport is not for them; the old tell the young they can only play on their (old) terms, in their clubs, using their facilities; the political leadership, mindful of the nation’s and ideology’s international reputation, decides that competitive Olympic (i.e. European) sports are the only civilised forms of culture.