Indiana University Press
Win or Else: Soviet Football in Moscow and Beyond, 1921-1985
Key Metrics
- Larry E Holmes
- Indiana University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780253069627
- -
- -
- Sports & Recreation > Soccer
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
In the early 1920s, the Soviet press denounced football as a bourgeois sport that was injurious to both mind and body. Within that same decade, however, it blew up, becoming the most popular spectator sport in the USSR and growing into a fiercely competitive business with complex regional and national bureaucracies, a strong international presence, and a conviction that victory on the field was also a victory of Soviet supremacy. Writing as both historian and fan, Holmes focuses his study on the provincial Kirov team Dinamo from 1979 to 1985, when the club played at both its worst and its best. Spurred by a dismal 1979 season, the team's administrators and regional authorities had two options: obey Moscow's edict to reduce expenditures on professional sports or seek out new--and often illicit--funding sources to fill out a team of champions.
Drawing on rich archival materials as well as newspapers and interviews with former players, Win or Else reveals the foundations of Soviet sports culture--and the hazards that teams faced both in victory and in loss.
Author Bio
Larry E. Holmes is a professor of history at the University of South Alabama where he has taught since 1968. During the 1992/3 academic year he lectured in Russian and Soviet History at Rostov State University in the Russian Federation.
Holmes has been the recipient of numerous awards including grants from the Kennan Institute, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Teachers of Russian, and the International Research and Exchanges Board. Author of The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse: Reforming Education in Soviet Russia, 1917Ð1931, and Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii: 1917Ð1941,
Holmes has also published articles in Slavic Review, Russian Review, History of Education Quarterly, and other scholarly forums. He lives in Mobile, AL.
Source: University of Pittsburgh Press
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