By EUvsDisinfo
Putin’s fight with ‘neoliberal’ international sports
On 17 October 2024, a few months after the Paris Olympic Games, Putin took part in a conference titled ‘Russia – a Sporting Power’, where he addressed the need to develop Russian sports and facilitate access to sporting facilities. However, the focus of Putin’s speech was not health and sports, but geopolitics, ‘traditional values’, and the Russian ‘another way’.
Putin’s central elements were: ‘Today, […] international sports and the Olympic movement are being turned, not into an arena for fair competition, but into a platform for geopolitical games, […] a destructive neoliberal agenda, propaganda of unnatural norms and pseudo-freedoms, and denial of the traditional values shared by the vast majority of countries for centuries and millennia. […] Russia and the global majority choose another [non-Western] way’.
At the conference, Putin ordered the Russian Minister for Sport to accelerate the organisation of an athletes’ parade on Red Square. In this way, Putin resumed the revival of this Stalinist public ritual: he originally spoke about organising a Red Square sports parade in December 2023, when he ordered the government to prepare proposals by March 2024.
Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!
Putin’s decision to stage an athletes’ parade on Red Square in Moscow is remarkable, as such a public spectacle makes a clear reference to the Stalin-era parades and of the cult of personality of the time.
The first Soviet Red Square athletes’ parade took place in 1919 and throughout the 1920s, these events took place irregularly. But with the strengthening of Stalin’s cult of personality, as of 1931, the athletes’ parades on Red Square became an annual spectacle of zealotry.
During the 1930s, these Red Square sports parades grew larger and larger every year with tens of thousands of athletes presenting the health, strength, and might of the Soviet people. These parades had the most evident political message: Stalin oversaw the parades, participants hailed him and glorified his picture, spreading his cult of personality across the USSR.
The 1935 parade introduced a well-known slogan – ‘Stalin is the pioneers’ best friend – while the 1936 parade featured the famous slogan ‘Thank you Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood!’.
The athletes’ parades had a number of militaristic elements, such as the slogans ‘Ready for Labour and Defence’; ‘Today an athlete, tomorrow a soldier’; and athletes marching with imitation weapons and models of tanks and military vessels.
Images curtesy of website [soviet-art.ru]
Shaping the narrative – sports, might, and military preparedness
Stalin’s sports parades were aimed not only at the promotion of health and fitness but also at projecting the might of a Soviet person, the USSR as a state, and its only Leader, Comrade Stalin.
In the 1930s, Stalin was not alone in his passion for parading sport and public health. Hitler and Mussolini also actively used sport and physical fitness as a key element in their totalitarian ideologies to create mass movements where the individual was just a tiny element in the larger collective of the party, the nation, or the state.
The only post-war Red Square athletes’ parade took place in August 1945 – the parades never returned to Red Square after that, and after Stalin’s death in 1953, they were completely cancelled in 1954 and never repeated by the Soviet authorities.
Putin’s revival of Stalin-style ceremonies
Ever more frequently Russian state TV channels are now re-broadcasting or promoting Stalin-era footage, clips or even entire films such as this one documenting the Soviet Union Parade of Athletes in July 1939 on Red Square.
Screenshot from State TV channel Russia Kultura. Film of the 1939 parade in Moscow
The possible return of the athletes’ parades to Red Square is not the first step Putin has taken to revive public mass manifestations. The 9 May Victory Day parade on Red Square has grown in size and militarist messaging during the past decade under Putin. During the USSR, this parade took place only four times (in 1945, 1965, 1985, and 1990). See our account of the parade’s history and messaging here.
In some respects, Putin goes much further in presenting Russian military might than post-Stalin Soviet rulers did – for example, after 1958, the USSR used no aviation in the Red Square military parade. Since 2008, Putin’s military parades feature aviation with an emphasis on heavy bombers, modern fighter aircraft, and attack helicopters.
From sports to politics: forget the repression of the Stalinist system
It was Nikita Khrushchev who terminated the Stalinist type of parades and started a de-Stalinisation with his 1956 ‘secret speech’. It would hardly be surprising if Putin were to declare that ‘Stalin was right’ and that the de-Stalinisation policy implemented by Khrushchev was ‘unpatriotic’ as in modern-day Russia, Khrushchev has already been accused of ‘betraying Russia and handing Crimea to Ukraine’.
Putin’s actions go hand-in-hand with the resurrection of Stalin in contemporary Russian culture: museums, arts, cinema, TV-series as well as in the education system and school. Stalin began to reappear more prominently in the public space after Putin returned for his third term as president in 2012 and the common element has been the glorification of the USSR in the 1930s.
This resurrection on the 1930s is all the more remarkable as this particular period is also when the Stalinist system accelerated repression and persecution of imaginary ‘enemies of the people’. Think of the hunt for the ‘kulaks’ (self-ownership peasants) leading to man-made famine especially in Ukraine, or the political show trials and purges known as the Moscow processes, or the widespread repression or ordinary Soviet citizens which the NGO ‘Memorial’ later documented. No wonder the Russian authorities has tried to shut down Memorial since 2021 – see our accounts here and here – and is now broadening the scope for mass parades.
See also our articles on Russian school books, the education system, Russian state-sponsored cartoons and video games.
By EUvsDisinfo
