Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Whatever internal politics (e.g., cronyism) may also have been involved, another phenomenon not unknown in the United States, selection to international teams was based primarily on the likelihood that the athlete would place highly, irrespective of recent victories in national championships. The final selection would be made on the basis of the athlete’s condition at training camp before departure for the competition.

  Supporting this sporting activity for both practitioners and fans was an extensive Soviet press dedicated to sport. Sovetsky Sport was the most prominent among over a dozen Soviet sports newspapers and periodicals. The publishing house Fizkultura i sport, founded in 1923, published 40 percent of all Soviet titles on sports. According to certain unofficial Soviet sources, articles submitted for publication in scholarly journals were carefully screened to keep important research findings from the Soviets’ competitors.

  SCARCITY OF RESOURCES

  Despite their outstanding success, the Soviets often lacked resources. As late as 1989 there were only 2,500 swimming pools in the Soviet Union, compared with more than one million in the United States. There were shortages of gynmasiums and equipment, and many schools lacked athletic play areas.

  Preference for elites over the masses sometimes provoked popular resentment alongside national

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  SPORTS POLICY

  Soviet athletes march through Red Square during the “physical culture” portion of a May Day parade. © HULTON ARCHIVE pride. Even Soviet leaders were sometimes critical of the neglect of mass physical fitness in favor of elite athletes, although obviously the latter were too valuable for propaganda purposes for the situation to be changed. At the same time, facilities, equipment, and sports clothing were sometimes lacking even for elites, leading to relative Soviet weakness in downhill skiing, for example. Moreover, Soviet athletes often found it necessary to use foreign equipment in international competition. Sports historian Robert Edelman has praised the Soviets for “using limited resources efficiently,” pointing out that Soviet Olympic victories were achieved “on a shoestring.”

  POLITICS

  In addition to demonstrating their athletic superiority, the Soviets used sports internationally to make political statements. The Soviet Union was among the leaders in isolating South Africa from international sport because of its policy of apartheid. It also canceled bilateral track and field meets with the United States from 1966 through 1968, giving the Vietnam War as the reason. The Soviet boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, on the other hand, was almost certainly intended as retaliation for the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which had protested the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

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  SPUTNIK

  Even before the American boycott, however, the Soviet Union had already seen the political implications of hosting the Olympics. For example, one of the members of the USSR Olympic Organizing Committee was G. P. Goncharov, the head of the Communist Party propaganda machine. Moreover, in the fall of 1979 the government arrested dissidents and warned other people who complained even mildly about conditions. In Moscow there was a campaign to remove drunks, the unemployed, and even teenagers and children from the city during the Olympics.

  CONCLUSION

  Soviet sports actually survived the Soviet Union in a sense, as in the 1992 Olympics athletes from the former Soviet Union competed together on what was known as the Unified Team. Although afterward the separate independent nations fielded separate teams, the memory persisted into 1996, as some Russian newspapers could not resist a brief mention that, added together, the former Soviet republics combined for the highest number of medals of any country. Economic problems would persist for the former Soviet sports programs, sometimes interfering with athletes’ training, but so would national pride and excellence, as the Russian Federation, for example, won 88 medals, second only to the United States with its larger population, in the 2000 Summer Olympics. See also: MOSCOW OLYMPICS OF 1980

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Booker, Christopher. (1981). The Games War: A Moscow Journal. London: Faber and Faber. Edelman, Robert. (1993). Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR. New York: Oxford University Press. Morton, Henry W. (1963). Soviet Sport: Mirror of Soviet Society. New York: Collier Books. Peppard, Victor, and Riordan, James. (1993). Playing Politics: Soviet Sport Diplomacy to 1992. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Riordan, James. (1977). Sport in Soviet Society: Development of Sport and Physical Education in Russia and the USSR. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Shneidman, N. Norman. (1978). The Soviet Road to Olympus: Theory and Practice of Soviet Physical Culture and Sport. Toronto: The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

  VICTOR ROSENBERG

  SPUTNIK

  On October 4, 1957, Soviet space scientists launched the first manmade Sputnik, or satellite, to orbit the earth. Sputnik had great significance on several counts. It indicated that the USSR was a world leader in science and engineering. It was a great propaganda achievement, enabling the nation’s leaders to claim both scientific preeminence and the superiority of the Soviet social system. Sputnik also triggered the space race, as the United States and the USSR committed to an expansive effort to be the first in a series of other space firsts. The USSR followed Sputnik with several other achievements: the first man in space (Yuri Gargarin); the first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova); the first two-person and three-person orbital flights; the first space walk; and so on. Sputnik also revealed that the USSR was or would soon be capable of launching intercontinental ballistic missiles.

  Sputnik was important to the Soviet people as well. It demonstrated to them that after years of sacrifice under Stalin the nation was truly on the road to communism based on the achievements of science. Tens of thousands of citizens gathered in the evenings to track Sputnik through the sky, using binoculars or amateur radios to pick up its signal. School children sang odes to Sputnik; poets wrote poems to Sputnik.

  Sputnik was only the first Soviet satellite: More than 2,700 others followed into space. While their primary purposes were military, they also served such ends as communication, meteorology, and global prospecting. See also: GAGARIN, YURI ALEXEYEVICH; SPACE PROGRAM; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  McDougall, Walter A. (1985). The Heavens and the Earth. New York: Basic Books.

  PAUL R. JOSEPHSON

  STAKHANOVITE MOVEMENT

  On August 31, 1935, Aleksei Stakhanov, a thirty-year-old miner in the Donets Basin, hewed 102 tons of coal during his six-hour shift. This amount represented fourteen times his quota, and within a few

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  STALINGRAD, BATTLE OF

  days his feat was hailed by Pravda as a world record. Anxious to celebrate and reward individuals’ achievements in production that could serve as stimuli to other workers, the party launched the Stakhanovite movement. The title of Stakhanovite, conferred on workers and peasants who set production records or otherwise demonstrated mastery of their assigned tasks, quickly superseded that of shockworker. Day by day throughout the autumn of 1935, the campaign intensified, culminating in an All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites in industry and transportation that met in the Kremlin in November. At the conference, outstanding Stakhanovites mounted the podium to recount how, defying their quotas and often the skepticism of their workmates and bosses, they applied new techniques of production to achieve stupendous results for which they were rewarded with wages that reached dizzying heights. Josef Stalin captured the upbeat mood of the conference when, by way of explaining how such records were only possible in the land of socialism, he uttered the phrase, “Life has become better, and happier too.” Widely disseminated, and even set to song, Stalin’s words served as the motto of the movement.

  The Stakhanovite movement thus encompassed lessons not only about how to work, but also about how to live. In addition to providing
a model for success on the shop floor, it conjured up images of the good life. Many of the same qualities Stakhanovites were supposed to exhibit in the one sphere-cleanliness, neatness, preparedness, and a keenness for learning-were applicable to the other. These qualities were associated with kultur-nost (culturedness), the acquisition of which marked the individual as a New Soviet Man or Woman. Advertisements for perfume, articles about Stakhanovites on shopping sprees, photographs of Stakhanovites sharing their happiness with their families, newsreels showing them driving new automobiles-presented to them as gifts-and moving into comfortable apartments all symbolized kul-turnost. Wives of male Stakhanovites had an important part to play in the movement as helpmates preparing nutritious meals, keeping their apartments clean and comfortable, and otherwise creating a cultured environment in the home so that their husbands were well-rested and eager to work with great energy. It was also important to demonstrate that Stakhanovites were admired by their comrades and considered worthy of holding public office.

  Notwithstanding the enormous publicity surrounding Stakhanovites and their achievements,

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  they were not necessarily popular. Even before the raising of output norms in early 1936, workers who had not been favored with the best conditions, and consequently struggled to fulfill their norms, expressed resentment of Stakhanovites by verbally and even physically abusing them. Foremen and engineers, only too well aware that record mania and the provision of special conditions for Stakhanovites created disruptions in production and bottlenecks in supplies, also on occasion sabotaged the movement. At least that was the accusation made against many who often served as scapegoats for the failure of the Stakhanovite movement to fulfill its promise of unleashing the productive forces of the country. Nevertheless, the Stakhanovite movement continued into the war and even enjoyed something of a revival in the postwar years, when it was exported to Eastern Europe. See also: INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET; KULTURNOST; SOVIET MAN

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Siegelbaum, Lewis H. (1988). Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941. New York: Cambridge University Press. Thurston, Robert. (1993). “The Stakhanovite Movement: The Background to the Great Terror in the Factories, 1935-1938.” In Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, eds. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning. New York: Cambridge University Press.

  LEWIS H. SIEGELBAUM STALIN CONSTITUTION See CONSTITUTION OF

  1936.

  STALINGRAD, BATTLE OF

  The Battle of Stalingrad (July 17, 1942-February 2, 1943) was the most significant Red Army victory during World War II. It included the Red Army’s defense against Operation “Blau” (Blue), the German Army’s summer 1942 advance to Stalingrad, and offensive operations in the fall of 1942 and winter of 1943 to defeat German and other Axis forces in the Stalingrad region.

  The defensive phase of the battle began on July 17, after German Army Groups “A” and “B” smashed the defenses of the Red Army’s Briansk,

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  STALINGRAD, BATTLE OF

  A Red Army soldier waves a flag while trucks gather in the square below during the Battle of Stalingrad. © HULTON ARCHIVE Southwestern, and Southern Fronts in southern Russia and advanced to the Don River west of Stalingrad. Initially, the newly formed Stalingrad Front, commanded by marshal of the Soviet Union S. K. Timoshenko, defended the Stalingrad region with the 21st, 62d, 63d, 64th, and 57th Armies, the 1st and 4th Tank Armies, and the 8th Air Army, which opposed the 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army of Army Group “B.” After overwhelming the 62nd and 64th Army’s defenses west of the Don River in late July and defeating a major counterstroke by the 1st and 4th Tank Armies, in late August General Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army broke through Soviet defenses along the Don River and reached the Volga River north of Stalingrad, while General Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army reached the city’s southwestern suburbs. The twin blows isolated the Soviet 62d and 64th Armies in Stalingrad and initiated two months of vicious and costly fighting for possession of the city. The fighting consumed the bulk of German forces and forced them to deploy weak Italian and Rumanian armies along their overextended flanks north and south of the city. While Stalin fed enough forces into Stalingrad to tie German forces down, the Stavka planned a counteroffensive, Operation “Uranus,” orchestrated by General A. M. Vasilevsky, to encircle and destroy Axis forces at Stalingrad.

  The offensive phase of the battle commenced on November 19, 1942, when the forces of General N. F. Vatutin’s and A. I. Eremenko’s Southwestern and Stalingrad Fronts pierced Axis defenses north and south of the city and joined west of Stalingrad on November 23, encircling more than 300,000 German and Rumanian forces in the city. Offensives by the Southwestern and Stalingrad Fronts along the Chir, Don, and Aksai Rivers in December destroyed the Italian 8th Army and frustrated two German attempts to rescue their forces besieged in Stalingrad. On February 2, 1943, after Bryansk, Voronezh, Southwestern, and Southern (former Stalingrad) Front forces attacked westward from the Don River and toward Rostov, General K. K.

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  STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH

  Rokossovsky’s Don Front defeated and captured Paulus’s 6th Army and almost 100,000 men.

  At a cost of more than one million casualties, including almost 500,000 dead, missing, or captured, during the battle the Red Army destroyed or badly damaged five Axis armies, including two German, totaling more than fifty divisions, and killed or captured more than 600,000 Axis troops. The unprecedented German defeat was a turning point indicative of eventual Red Army victory in the war. See also: WORLD WAR II

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Beevor, Antony. (1998). Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1941-1943. New York: Viking Erickson, John. (1975). The Road to Stalingrad. New York: Harper amp; Row. Glantz, David M. (1995). When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

  DAVID M. GLANTZ

  STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH

  (1879-1953), general secretary of the Communist Party, Soviet dictator.

  Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who in revolutionary work was called Koba before adopting the nom de plume Stalin, was born in Gori, Georgia, to a working-class family; his father was a cobbler and his mother a domestic servant. Many of the details of his early life remain in dispute, but his education was gained at a local church school and the Tiflis (Tbilisi in Georgian) Orthodox seminary, from which he was expelled in 1899. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party soon after its foundation, and in 1901 was elected to the Tiflis Social Democratic Committee. Following the split in the party in 1903, Stalin became a Bolshevik. For the following decade and a half, he was involved in a variety of revolutionary activities, including the publication of illegal materials, organizational work among workers and within the party, and bank raids to garner funds to sustain party work. He met Vladimir Lenin in 1905, and briefly traveled abroad on party business to Stockholm, London, Kracow, and Vienna. In 1912

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  he was elected in his absence onto the party Central Committee and became an editor of the party newspaper, Pravda. In 1913 he wrote his most important early work, Marxism and the National Question. His revolutionary work was interrupted by arrest in 1902, 1909, 1912, and 1913; he escaped from the first three bouts of exile and returned to Petrograd from the last one when the tsar fell in February 1917. In 1903 he married his first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze, his son Yakov was born in 1904, and his wife died of tuberculosis in 1907.

  When Stalin returned to Petrograd soon after the tsar’s fall, he was one of the leading Bolsheviks in the city. He was elected to the newly established Russian bureau of the party and to the editorial board of Pravda. Along with Vyacheslav Molotov and Lev Kamenev, he championed the policy of support for the Provisional Government and a defen-sist position on the war, until Vladimir Lenin returned in April and overturned these in favor of a more revolutionar
y stance. Stalin went along with Lenin’s views. During the revolutionary period, Stalin seems to have spent most of his time on organizational work. He was not a stirring speaker like Trotsky or someone with the presence of Lenin, and therefore after the return of Lenin and the emigr?s, he was not seen as one of the leading lights of the party. Nevertheless, following the seizure of power in October, Stalin became people’s commissar for nationalities, a position that from April 1919 he held jointly with the post of people’s commissar of state control (from February 1920, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate). The latter post was concerned with the elimination of corruption and inefficiency in the central state machine. During the civil war, Stalin was active on a series of military fronts, and it was at this time that his first major clash with Leon Trotsky occurred. More importantly, when the Politburo, Orgburo, and Secretariat of the Central Committee were established in March 1919, Stalin became a member of all three. He was the only member simultaneously of these bodies and the CC, and was therefore in a place of significant organizational power. In April 1922 he was elected general secretary of the party, and therefore the formal head of the party’s organizational machine. With Lenin’s illness from May 1922 and his death in January 1924, Stalin was able to make use of this power to consolidate his control at the top of the party structure.

  Lenin’s death was followed by intensified factional conflict among his would-be successors.

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