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Serious Fun: A History Of Spectator Sports In The U.S.S.R.
"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 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.
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 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.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 7, 2019
This is one of the few English-language books to look at Soviet sports and how the Soviet people consumed sports. Focusing mainly on soccer, with a little attention to hockey and basketball (in that order the three main spectator sports of the USSR), Edelman demonstrates that Soviet society was not that different than the West when it came to viewing sports.
The book does not look at games, players, or stats, but instead looks at how the sports were consumed, formed, and organised throughout the Soviet era. It is limited in that he wrote it as the USSR fell, so there is no archival material used as a source: instead he heavily relies on Soviet newspapers, which does limit the interpretation (a fact he admits in his next book on Spartak Moscow, which made use of archival material). However that is not a major detriment, as Edelman does give some good perspective, albeit the reader should be cautious as new material has somewhat changed the outlook on Soviet sports (the government did try to play a larger role than implied here). For people interested in Soviet sports, this is a key book to read, and is definitely a formative text on the subject.
One minor issue though is that throughout the book there are many spelling errors, with the most egregious being the use of "Tblisi" rather than "Tbilisi." It is a peculiar error, as the Russian version of the city doesn't omit any "i" like happens here, and while barely noticeable to most readers, is still something that should have been caught.
The book does not look at games, players, or stats, but instead looks at how the sports were consumed, formed, and organised throughout the Soviet era. It is limited in that he wrote it as the USSR fell, so there is no archival material used as a source: instead he heavily relies on Soviet newspapers, which does limit the interpretation (a fact he admits in his next book on Spartak Moscow, which made use of archival material). However that is not a major detriment, as Edelman does give some good perspective, albeit the reader should be cautious as new material has somewhat changed the outlook on Soviet sports (the government did try to play a larger role than implied here). For people interested in Soviet sports, this is a key book to read, and is definitely a formative text on the subject.
One minor issue though is that throughout the book there are many spelling errors, with the most egregious being the use of "Tblisi" rather than "Tbilisi." It is a peculiar error, as the Russian version of the city doesn't omit any "i" like happens here, and while barely noticeable to most readers, is still something that should have been caught.
June 20, 2018
Good stuff here, a tiny part of which was used in my article https://melmagazine.com/weve-exhauste...
July 12, 2020
Exquisite.
Read
April 26, 2012For a piece of academia it's not a bad book. From the revolution going forward, soccer has been Russia's first love. Basketball, which spread to the Soviet Union from Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania (brought to these three by the YMCA), has now surpassed Canadian hockey as their second love.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews