Against Freeloading and Bourgeois Morés

Krasnyi sport. Against Freeloading and Bourgeois Morés. February 1, 1938

By the late 1930s, Soviet sport had developed a contradiction its ideologues could no longer ignore. Officially a mass movement for popular health, in practice it sustained an elite of record-setters maintained on stipends, side jobs, and invented sinecures. No figures embodied this more than the Starostin brothers of Spartak Moscow, whose football empire ran on payments and patronage that mocked the rhetoric of amateur physical culture. This 1938 commentary, responding to a January decree of the All-Union Committee, denounces such arrangements as "bourgeois professionalism" smuggled in by "enemies of the people," language that within four years would be turned on the Starostins themselves.

Original Source: Против иждивенчества и буржуазных нравов. Красный спорт : московский выпуск 1938, № 16, 1 Feb 1938

In recent years, physical culture organizations have seen an especially widespread proliferation of all manner of payments — so-called subsidies and stipends — which has led to the lush flowering of dependent, at times outright grasping attitudes among a significant portion of physical culturalists and athletes. This came about because sports societies replaced genuine concern for people and the creation of necessary conditions for outstanding masters of sport with handouts that corrupted people and brought enormous harm to the entire physical culture movement.

Enemies of the people who had wormed their way into the leadership of sport and physical culture understood this and did everything possible to infect Soviet athletes with the spirit of bourgeois professionalism.

The country, caring for the health of the people, gave physical culture organizations colossal resources, earmarking them for the development of a genuinely mass physical culture and sport. And yet, in the pursuit of records — of points, centimeters, and seconds — certain leaders of sports societies, with the blessing of the central physical culture organs, began to spend these funds on a closed little group of master record-setters, neglecting the interests of the masses of rank-and-file physical culturalists. These societies ceased serious work on cultivating new sporting cadres. Consigning instructional, methodological, and educational work to oblivion, they launched a flurry of activity recruiting, buying off, and luring away athletes.

The harmful influence then spread not only to outstanding master record-setters but also to the rising cadres, to the youth who were only just beginning their athletic careers.

In transferring onto a subsidy, a young, not yet formed person was torn away from the production collective, from the public life of his enterprise. The society, in return, gave him nothing but the subsidy itself. Thus was created the ground for the penetration into the milieu of Soviet athletes of harmful tendencies characteristic of bourgeois clubs.

On January 4 of this year, the All-Union Committee on Physical Culture and Sports Affairs handed down a decision that should bring order to the expenditure of funds and put an end to the anti-state practice in spending these resources that has gained wide currency among a significant portion of sports societies.

The decision of the All-Union Committee provides for the rendering of a degree of material assistance to outstanding athletes for the purpose of raising their mastery and technique. At the same time, it decisively excludes any payments whatsoever to persons whose technical results differ little from the achievements of rank-and-file physical culturalists and athletes. All payments must be made only with the permission of the All-Union Committee, and any unauthorized expenditures under this heading will be regarded as the illegal spending of state and public funds.

Unquestionably, the basic mass of physical culturalists and athletes warmly supports the decision of the All-Union Committee. The physical culturalists of our country, who daily feel the uninterrupted growth of their well-being, have no need of side earnings and handouts. But it is also unquestionable that there will be — and already are — people attempting to obscure the political, principled significance of this large and beneficial measure.

In the lists of subsidy payments submitted to the All-Union Committee, many societies have enrolled athletes of middling and below-middling caliber. So, for example, the Torpedo society is petitioning to establish a stipend for the track-and-field athlete Fogelson, who runs the hundred meters in 11.3 and stands only in the fourth ten of Union sprinters at that distance.

The Stalinets society has declared, among genuinely major athletes, Gracheva, Tikhomirov, Larionova, Venevtsev, and many others whose technical results are unknown beyond their own society.

The KIM society has included in its list the skier Lineva, who to this day belongs to another society and is only just preparing to formalize her transfer to KIM.

By what were the persons guided who signed these lists on behalf of their societies? Did they grasp the meaning of the struggle for the healthy reform of physical culture organizations? No! They did not.

These facts bear witness to the numerous attempts to slip onto the lists of those entitled to receive subsidies persons who ought not to enjoy this privilege. And what can one say of all the contrivances and attempts under various pretexts to keep the old order in force. Schemers invent superfluous positions for trainers, directors, and instructors for athletes to whom money cannot officially be paid.

The physical culture community, the physical culturalists themselves, must see to it that the decision of the All-Union Committee does not remain on paper, as has happened more than once with many very important and necessary decisions.

The implementation of the new procedure for paying stipends amounts to a fundamental breaking of a most harmful tradition that has put down deep roots. This break is unthinkable without serious, in-depth explanatory and propagandistic work among physical culturalists and athletes.

At the same time, the leaders of the societies and the physical culturalists themselves must give a fitting rebuff to those who think to feed off physical culture.

The title of Soviet athlete is an honored, respected title — not the source of easy income into which it has lately been transformed for certain people who have forgotten the principles of Soviet sport.