Spartakiades: when the USSR organized its own Olympic Games

The term was carefully chosen. When the Soviets decided to organize their first sporting event in 1928, they took up the idea of ​​the Czechoslovakian Jiří František Chaloupecký, who had named a local gymnastics competition Spartakiades – a double reference to the slave revolt led by Spartacus (and crushed in 71 BCE by Rome) and the Spartacist League, a German far-left movement founded in 1914 (and crushed in 1919 by Berlin).

A clever find for these competitions which aimed to combine sport and communism, physical culture and “damned of the earth”, against capitalism and its “bourgeois” Olympism. Beyond the celebration of a sporting ideal marked with the seal of proletarian insurrection, the Spartakiads were above all an opportunity, for Moscow, to disseminate its own vulgate…

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Culture under Stalin, art brought to heel

First edition of the Games by the Red Sports International

It was in the Russian capital that the first edition was held, organized by the Red Sports International and bringing together 542 men and 70 women from 12 foreign countries, as well as 3,000 men and 879 women from the USSR. Sportingly, the only difference with the Olympic Games is the addition of a discipline, motorcycling. The objective was above all ideological: to remind people that the USSR was the only “homeland of the proletariat”, if necessary by welcoming foreigners in large numbers to shower them with “socialist happiness”. “Soviet athletes, who largely dominate the events, are held up as living proof of the progress made in all sectors of society”underlines the historian André Gounot in History notebooks (No. 88, 2002).

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The following Spartakiads, organized in Berlin in 1931, also illustrated the hostility of the USSR towards social democracy. At the time, in fact, the Comintern (the Communist International) spread the slogan “class against class”, pushing foreign comrades to fight against other left-wing forces as well as against fascism. A disastrous strategy which opened the way to Hitler in Germany… These competitions were thus to act as a counterweight to the Workers’ Olympiad in Vienna, organized by the Socialist Workers’ Sports International, independent of the USSR and which promoted the anti-fascist common front. . Alas, the Spartakiads were banned by the Weimar Republic, which refused Soviet visa requests, then banned the festivities, following a demonstration by unemployed workers which had degenerated.

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Ironically, the last Spartakiades, which brought together 3,000 athletes from 19 countries in Paris in 1934, saw the Kremlin abandon its “class against class” doctrine characterized by radical hostility towards the moderate left, and of which the limits were demonstrated by the seizure of power by the Nazis. Fascism becoming the identified enemy, henceforth, room for “popular fronts” between left-wing forces: the organizers therefore invited other socialist sports associations to the festivities. There was no longer any question, then, of extolling the merits of the USSR alone: ​​from then on, the usefulness of the Spartakiads was called into question.

With Stalin, the USSR joins the Olympics

After the Second World War, Stalin considered it more judicious to join the Olympic Games, to claim to contribute to world peace without holding isolated “counter-games”. More than ever, it was necessary to display the supposed good health of socialism: a gamble paid off since, from their first participation in the Summer Olympics in Helsinki in 1952, Soviet athletes won 22 gold medals, 30 silver medals and 19 medals. bronze!

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A success which inaugurated a new public relations strategy: rather than denying Olympism, it was better to exploit it for the greater glory of communism…

➤ Article published in the GEO History magazine n°73, Olympic Gamesfrom January-February 2024.

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