Book review: James Riordan, Soviet Sport: Background to the Olympics

James (Jim) Riordan’s Soviet Sport: Background to the Olympics (1980) investigates the establishment of the Soviet model of modern sports and its domination of the Olympic Games between 1952 and 1991. This book is a concise study based on fieldwork and primary and secondary sources. Sport in the Soviet Union was a surrogate religion, transformative socially and culturally, and as part of the nation-state-building programme of Lenin and Stalin, the healthy Soviet working-class citizen archetype became a propaganda icon. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) state planners argued that the Soviet system and society (the USSR) were superior to the Western capitalist model. However, the seventy years of its regime ended in 1991 with the Soviet Union’s demise. Soviet Sport is a comprehensive account of one facet of the Marxist-Leninist project. It includes comments about all 15 Soviet republics that constituted the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Belarus, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Georgia, Armenia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, and Kyrgyzstan. Source: James Riordan (1980), Washington Mews Books: New York & London, ISBN: 0814773834, Pp. 172.