Sports in the Soviet media: between policy and representation

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FEDERAL STATE AUTONOMOUS EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION

FOR HIGHER PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION

NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

St. Petersburg School of Social Sciences and Area Studies

Bachelor's project

Sports in the Soviet Media: Between Policy and Representation

Nikita Valerevich Nikiforov

Saint Petersburg 2020

Content

Introduction

1. Literature review

2. Data

3. Methods

4. Results

Discussion

Conclusion

References

Appendix

Introduction

During the Cold War, sports and physical education (fizkultura) in socialist countries were the objects of the study for researchers. Sports was mainly studied as a form of propaganda used to strengthen the belief in the ideas of communism through high achievements of the members of the society, including Olympic medals and prizes (Riordan, 1974:57), (Parks, 2009). Nevertheless, researchers state that sports in USSR were also designed to assimilate workers and ex-peasants, allowing people to work together and increase solidarity among each other, thus being more effective in shaping their country's life and society (Riordan & Riordan, 2002:51), (Riordan, 1974:323).. The sports in the Soviet Union, however, were not developed since the beginning: in 1917, just formed Soviet Republic accounted for only 800 sports clubs with up to 50000 members (Louis & Louis, 1980:4). The story of the continuous progressive implementation of sports and physical education into Soviet society started in April of 1918 when the distinction between military training and sports was not yet clear enough (Louis & Louis, 1980:4). From this point onward, the Soviet Republic's administration has been implementing different reforms aimed at improvements in the physical education of the society, and the Soviet sport began to take its shape to be one of the most dominating sports players on the international competitive scene since 1952 (Riordan & Riordan, 2002:57). Soviet sports were the popular topic and its importance for the state and people is still explored by researchers nowadays. However, the USSR was different throughout the time, and so were the image of the sports and sports games. From 1920s to late 1940s Soviet physical education was used merely as a tool for creating a stronger and healthier population, whereas since the late 1940s, the Soviet authorities saw international area not as “a possible threat, but as a possible platform with the great publicity potential” (Mertin, 2009:471). Besides, the in the study of Vassil Girginov, the USSR's way of developing sports is tightly connected with the forming role of the “political athlete” who is not necessarily a leader, but is able to complete the tasks using the brute force, whereas the role of the leader is maintained by the government (Girginov, 2004:32). This example shows a political orientation in the process of the athlete's image formation. And, based on this assumption, it is possible that the media coverage of different sports will be different throughout the time, too: from utilitarian political athlete agenda to the international grouping achievements upraising Soviet teams over foreign ones. I expect individual sports types like the ones mostly oriented on fitness and maintaining a healthy form to be more covered in earlier periods of the USSR. It can be explained by the fact that those individual types of sports are not always setting the goal to win in the competition, but rather than to develop the one's physical form. At the same time, I expect team games that are mostly result-oriented to be more media covered as the time goes by and the Soviet Union starts to participate in international competitions, because most of the time the goal of the team games is based on beating another team. This idea also comes from the studies devoted to the differences of the traits of people belonging to different kinds of sports (Nia & Besharat, 2010). For example, people engaged in sports are more prone to be autonomic and less prone to be agreeable. And another difference that is the most important in this distinction of two types of sports is that indeed people belonging to group sports tend to have lower success motivation based on the psychological studies, showing that results and achievements are more peculiar to group sports (Kajbafnezhad & Ahadi, et. al, 2011).

I have selected the sports media as a tool for the analysis because they could be a strong element in supporting sports propaganda agenda that could strengthen sports culture in the country overall (Mertin, 2009:472). And assuming that sports media serves as a propaganda tool, it can be possible that there will be more attention paid to the sports that are prior for the Soviet power elite. In this work, I would like to focus on the coverage of the Soviet Union individual and team sports or sports games and physical education practices in the sports journals of the Soviet period. In other words, the research question is whether the media coverage of the individual and teamplay-based sports or sport games will be changing throughout the time in the Soviet Union. It could be argued, though, that there could be just general changes around the world leading to the higher popularity of individual sports in the first half of 20th century, but the history of the global sports signifies that the teamplay-based games like basketball, soccer, American football or baseball have been generally more covered in the media compared to the individual sports (McComb, 2004). The first hypothesis is that the coverage of the teamplay based sports in the Soviet media will be increasing with the time, whereas the coverage of the individual sports games will be decreasing in later periods of the USSR. But there can also be a mediating effect of the international competitions that can boost the popularity of the sports that are included in the Olympic Games program, and it must be taken into account. Thus, the second hypothesis is that the Olympic Games, as the biggest international sports event, will cause an increase in the media coverage of the sports included in the program. However, the changes of the individual and teamplay-based games coverage are not the only possible changes that could happen in the sports agenda in the USSR media. There could be some general discourse changes happening in the sports media, and it can be checked in this study as well. It means that the third hypothesis is that there will be general changes in certain topics discussed in the Soviet sports media with the time. For instance, I expect discussions devoted to militarism to be higher in 1930s when Tukhachevskii proposed a plan devoted to development of Red Army's structures also known as “Red Militarism” (Flaherty, 1991:142). I also expect the discussions related to Stalin to fall in the later periods of the USSR starting from Khrushchev's era because of the de-Stalinization and discreditation of the Stalin's regime (Jones, 2006). The possible findings in this article can show if the Soviet sports media was engaged in the spreading of values and priorities approved by the Soviet Union power elite.

1. Literature review

In this section, I will outline the most important historical events related to sports of the USSR. This chapter will be useful to understand the way in which the Soviet sports have been developing, and this historical background is important because the nature of the hypotheses and research question are based on the historical assumption of the prevailing teamplay-based games in later periods of the USSR.

Since the formation of the Soviet Republic, sporting events there were isolated from other countries during the first years after the revolution in 1917. (Arnaud & Riordan, 2013:69). Other countries and International Olympic Committee were not recognizing Soviet Republic as the state, which is why Soviet Republic had no choice but to hold independent sports events (Arnaud & Riordan, 2013:70). But it was caused not only by the impossibility of integration in the Western world's sports movement but also by an unwillingness to accept bourgeois culture not in culture nor in sports (Arnaud & Riordan, 2013:68). In the issue, in 1921 the Red Sport International has been formed. It was one of the key moments in the history of early Soviet sports. Red Sport International (RSI) was created in order to hold just formed USSR's own sporting events and popularize sports and physical education among people. Back then, the sports was not used as a source of the propaganda against other countries, it was closer to the ideological side related to the formation of the healthy working class. The RSI had a rival in the face of Worker Sport International, even despite the fact that both organizations carried socialistic ideas. Red Sport International came up with its counterbalance to the Olympic Games - Spartakiad. Eventually, Red Sport International held four Spartakiads with the first conducted in 1928 and last one conducted in 1936. Compared to the 1920s, in the 1930s, sports in the Soviet Union was developing faster: Spartakiads, sporting events for youth, establishing of governmental sports-military program called GTO which is translated as “Ready for Labor and Defense” (Padunov & O'Mahony, 2007:83). Along with GTO, there also were different parades devoted to physical education and this approach of mixing sports with the grandiose celebrations was gathering even more youth to take an interest in physical education. Not only sporting events for amateurs were developing, professional sports were growing as well. For example, in 1934, the International Football Association named FIFA allowed Czech Republic to have a match against the Soviet football team, even though back then USSR was not a part of FIFA's community and the entrance of the USSR to FIFA occurred only in 1947 (Keys, 2003:421). By the middle of the 1930s, the Soviet authorities started to see the danger from the side of Germany and Hitler's regime. Because of it, Red Sport International and Worker Sport International have decided to prohibit athletes from visiting Berlin's Olympic games held in 1936. At the same time, sportsmen from USSR could visit Worker Sport International games held in 1937, which was not possible until the moment. But this view of the Soviet Union remained until the 1939 when USSR concluded a nonaggression agreement with Nazi Germany. After this agreement, USSR and Germany exchanged some athletes. Soviet and German athletes were competing with each other during the years 1939 and 1940 (Arnaud & Riordan, 2013:77).

After the World War II USSR had to restore most of the infrastructure related to sports (Köhring, 2010). And after this war, the views of the USSR on international sporting events have changed. That is where the world divided on the western and eastern part and sport has become an area for ideological battles between different world views (Riordan, 1993:119), (Borish, 2017). In order to spread its influence, USSR had to be able to compete at the international level, so starting from 1948 ministry of the sport was exploring possibilities for USSR to compete in “Olympiad”: the group of people was sent to the Games held in 1948 to see if Soviet athletes can compete with other nations (Riordan, 1993:120). In 1951 the Soviet Union has entered in International Olympic committee which meant that since then Soviet athletes were able to participate in the Olympic games (Riordan, 1993:120). This was the second important turning point in the history of communist sports: now Soviet athletes could prove their strength and what was even more important for the Soviet power elite, they had a chance to prove the dominance of communism over capitalism (Riordan, 1974:331-332), (Hunt, 2019).

The first performance of the Soviet Union in the Olympic Games was impressive: they won almost 33 percent of all medals (Metsä-Tokila, 2002). Because of the success that the Soviet Union had in representing East European countries, the Soviet branch of the International Olympic Committee proposed to keep expanding the community of the Olympic Committee, supposedly to be able to spread the influence of socialistic society further (Parks, 2013). With the advent of the new Secretary of State, Nikita Khrushchev, special sports schools began to appear (Metsä-Tokila, 2002:198). The emergence of special schools was determined by the growing desire to strengthen the dominance of Soviet athletes on the world stage. Those schools had little in common with classical schools because physical education in schools was not aimed at achieving Olympic prizes. Despite this fact, regular schools that were not created for talented young athletes also had physical education in their curriculum but the motivation behind this was mostly connected with the promotion of healthy way of life rather than with the Olympic games (Grant, 2010). Thus, even despite the fact that results in Olympic games had the high priority for the USSR's authorities (Riordan, 1974:333), they also were developing sports infrastructure for ordinary citizens and amateurs. By 1967, in the USSR there were more than 200,000 sports independent organizations called “collectives” with more than 50 million participants These sports collectives could exist in different factories, institutions, collective farms. In the 1970s more than 44 million people were engaged in different sports activities (Howell, 1975:140). The daily sport was also promoted through Soviet media: the Soviet Union was using posters, magazines, newsreels to develop an interest in sports (Istyagina-Eliseeva & Barienikova, 2015:54). But despite this democratization and promotion of sports among usual citizens, in reality, prizes on international areas still had a high priority. One of the peaks and the most popular examples of Soviet-American rivalry in sports during the Cold War was the famous chess match between Robert James Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972 (Edmonds & Eidinow, 2011). With chess being an unusual sport, USSR wanted to prove its dominance in the intellectual sports sphere as well, and the USA wanted the same, which resulted in one of the toughest and the most stressful matches in the world history of chess with the defeat of Soviet side.

It is also useful to look at GDR's experience in sports, because it was USSR's ally and had a similar path in this sphere, so probably there will be some points of the interconnection, and the USSR's sports policy is related to GDR as well. The Soviet Union had an open influence of the GDR's sports and politics, and the USSR's policy regarding the popularization of sports and increased focus on results in the international arena leaked into the GDR's society. This approach resulted in a big success of Eastern Germany in the Olympic Games. Although until the Olympic Games in 1968, Eastern Germany was participating in games together with Western Germany, since the French games in 1968, the two teams have separated from each other (Hardman & Naul, 2005:39).

These French games in 1968 were the only ones in which the FRG's team bettered the GDR, and in all subsequent games the GDR dominated its neighbors even having 3 times lower population, and the GDR itself was considered one of the best teams in the Olympic Games until German's reunification in 1990 (Hardman & Naul, 2005:68). Another popular example of politics' intervention in sports was connected with these countries: when the FRG along with the Western world has decided not to visit the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980, which resulted in the same ignorance of the Los-Angeles Olympic Games in 1984 from the side of the Soviet Union and the GDR (Hardman & Naul, 2005), (D'Agati, 2013). The reason why USSR's games were ignored by the USA and countries belonging to NATO was the escalation of the conflict between Eastern and Western world and the invasion of Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan (Deal, 2014). Even though USSR claimed that it was not planning to strike back and boycott the Olympic Games in the USA in 1984, the final decision was still not to visit Los Angeles, even despite the fact that soviet athletes have been preparing for the Olympic Games (Kobierecki, 2015:100-101). One way or another, USSR's focus on the Olympic Games lasted until the very last Soviet Union's games in the 1988 where they one more time won the championship in both summer and winter games. After the collapse of the USSR, a series of studies regarding the Soviet athletes' practices of using blood doping were conducted. It turned out that USSR athletes used drugs prohibited by the International Olympic Committee (Kalinski, 2003).

Another key feature related to sports is spectatorship and its practices in the USSR. In order to promote sports and physical education, it is useful to also broadcast things related to it as it was in the United States (McChesney, 1989). The spectatorship in the USSR was not developed that good as it was in western countries: Soviet tv-channels were not broadcasting a lot of games. For example, in the 1980s approximately 2 percent of air time during the weekdays was devoted to sports, and 7 percent of air time was devoted to sports during the weekend (Smith, 1994:200). But at the same time, tickets for sporting events were cheap and workers were able to receive discounts for matches.

The problem was different: most of the people were not interested in any sport other than soccer. It resulted in an interesting phenomenon: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was trying to make sporting activities more versatile, whereas most of the workers did not need that because they usually wanted to play soccer or watch over it (Smith, 1994:39). But some people were not visiting stadiums because they preferred to complement the practice of watching a sports game by drinking alcohol in beer bars, because on the stadium alcohol consumption was prohibited (Smith, 1994:191). This went against the intentions of the party, for which it was more profitable to maintain a healthy image of the nation, including through the broadcast of game matches. And the attention of the Soviet audience was not that useful when it came to success in the Olympic Games. As it was said, soccer was by far the most interesting sport for the Soviet spectators, although compared to other sports, USSR's achievements were not that surprising. For example, gymnastics, fencing, canoeing, and wrestling were not popular among soviet viewers, but the results in these disciplines were the highest. In any case, for now, we cannot state for sure if the broadcasting of sports was really important in the popularization of sports among citizens, but it did not play a significant role in the strengthening USSR's positions in the Olympic Games (Smith, 1994).

Overall, the historical background of the Soviet sports and sport related policy shows that throughout the time USSR's view of sports has been changing: firstly it was more an assistant tool in building the image of the strong and healthy person able to deal with day-to-day tasks and be able to serve its government in 1920s-1940s, which coincides with the idea of the political athlete handling the tasks set by the government (Mertin, 2009:471), (Girginov, 2004:32).. Later on the positive international image of the soviet sportsmen has become an important part of the goals related to sports in USSR. Based on all this information, I am aimed on revealing if the content of the Soviet sports journals will be changing as it is described in historical background of the sports movement in USSR.

2. Data

To answer the hypotheses and to have a descriptive idea of the studied subject, it is important to have a data structure that combines different datasets. In our case, those different sets are: digitalized media content, related to sports: the selected and processed list of the sports journals of the USSR; data about Olympic Games dates and USSR's results in those games extracted from the official website of the International Olympic Committee.

Digitalized media content in our case stands for the digital sports magazines. It is the hard part because it has some important limitations: firstly, it was not possible to find all of the editions of the selected journals, because there are only a few archives in the Internet which are not always complete. Second, as the data gathering required optical character recognition, some of the earliest editions from 1920s and 1930s had some noisy data because the prints in earlier editions are worse than in the later ones. It is important, however, to do so, because without textual layout any procedures connected with text mining are impossible. For optical character recognition I used commercial program “ABBY FineReader 15” that allows users to make textual layouts for printed files. I have been searching for the archives of sports journals around the network, and I have selected the following magazines: “Physical Education and Sports” («Fizkultura i sport»: 1928-1931, 1933-1941, 1949, 1959-1964, 1973-1975, 1978, 1980-1981, 1984, 1986-1991); “Chess in the USSR “Track and Field Athletics” («Legkaya Atletika»: 1955-1991); Weekly “Soccer. Hockey” («Ezhenedelnik Futbol.Hokkei»: 1960-1991). Overall, the corpus contains 102 yearly editions, and has 44.5 million of words (punctuation included). The journal “Physical Education and Sports” is a monthly edition and it was founded in 1928, the journal was mainly covering sports events, promoting sporting health education.

The journal still exists, but the editions related to the post-soviet Russia has not been taken in the study. “Athletics” is also a monthly journal. It was created in 1955 and exists to this day, the main topics are: covering sports events and giving advice about physical training and exercises for athletes. The weekly magazine “Soccer. Hockey” was founded in 1960 and back then it was only devoted to the soccer, but in 1967 it also started to publish hockey articles, and the main topics were the information about soccer and hockey teams and covering sports events. From the information about collected magazines it is also seen that years from middle 1950s to 1991 are represented more extensively, which is also one of the limitations related to media section. Those journals have been selected because there are magazines that are mostly related to individual games and sports like “Athletics” journal; there is a journal devoted to the teamplay-based games: “Soccer. Hockey” and there is a general sports-related magazine “Physical Education and Sports” that covers the general information about different sports and sports games. This journal also has more data from the earlier periods of the USSR like late 1920s and 1930s so it will be the main tool used for the analysis. The other journals will be used more in testing the 2nd and 3rd hypotheses because checking the amount of the individual or group sports in specialized journal will cause a sampling bias so the independent journal is used in testing the first hypothesis.

Another part of the data, the Olympic Games competitions, includes the data about Olympic competitions in which USSR was taking part. Competitions data is the mediator and I expect it to have point effects on both media coverage and general sports data: for example, a huge boost in coverage of sports related to the Olympic Program on the eve of Olympic Games.

3. Methods

For the analysis I used the following methods: topic modeling (LDA) and descriptive statistics of the relative grouped sports term frequencies over the time. The study is chronological, which means that the results of the applied methods will be compared throughout time.

The relative grouped sports term frequencies will be used to analyze which sports and sports games were the most covered ones in the sport discourse over the time. There are some of the sports selected manually belonging to either individual or teamplay-based sports. For this analysis I have created a dictionary (App. 1) by selecting certain sports and sports terms and finding all of the possible forms of the selected words in the open-source dictionary “Open Corpora” (App. 2). This is due to the fact that there is lack of sports-related dictionaries in Russian. The sports term frequencies will be used to compare sports of a certain type (individual or collective) coverage by period inside either individual or teamplay-based group. At the same time, I will compare both individual and team-play based sports between themselves in the different periods of the USSR. For the comparison of sports-terms frequencies within a single group in different time periods, the ANOVA test will be used. For the comparison of the relative coverage of different types of sports in different periods, the Chi-Square will be used.

To analyze the discourse and the main topic in different time periods of the USSR, the topic modeling algorithms will be used. Topic modeling algorithms extract the terms that are often found next to each other and assign them to several topics which have different proportions for documents used for the analysis. This method is needed to find the topics that were peculiar to certain periods in Soviet sports media. It can be used to trace how certain topics have been changing their share in documents of different years, and it could be useful in revealing the shifts that happen in the overall agenda depicted in journals in relation to certain objects or entities. For the LDA, all three journals have been used, which stands for the model with 44.5M of words with punctuation. I have chosen model with the 400 topics, and among the 400 topics the fourth most controversial topics that can be related to the history of the USSR will be selected. I have selected four topics they clearly reflected one discourse that can be related to the study hypotheses, whereas most of the topics were noisy and uninformative.

For all of the methods, the programming language “R” and text-mining libraries were used.

4. Results

To answer the first hypothesis of the study, it was important to divide selected sports or sports games into category of the individualistic or team ones. For the analysis, I have selected the following individual sports: the athletics, the gymnastics, the tennis, the swimming, the biking, and the skiing. The team games are the following: the hockey, the water polo, the soccer, the basketball, the volleyball, and the handball. I extracted the following games and all the forms of the words belonging to them from the open corpora dictionary and connected these words to the tokenized table of the “Physical Education and Sports” journal. Then I normalized the amount of mentioned games and sports by dividing the number of mentions on the number of the words in the document and multiplied this number by 1000 to make it more readable for the graphs. Then I have made a graph illustrating how the relative media coverage has been changing for different types of sports, and on the graphs below the results are presented:

Figure 1. Changing media coverage of the team games in Physical Education and Sports magazine.

Figure 2. Changing media coverage of the individual games in Physical Education and Sports magazine.

On Figure 1. it can be seen that team games had a positive trend in the media coverage with time, even though that the amount of mentions fluctuates throughout the time periods. The graph related to individual sports (Figure 2.) illustrates the opposite trend of the falling media coverage of the individualistic games and kinds of sports. It is worth noticing that both graphs have some common points of ups and downs: for example, both graphs have a peak of sports mentions in 1959 and low values in 1931 and 1933, and it can be explained from the context of the sources: 1959's edition had a topic of popularization of different kinds of sports and they were discussed throughout the journal in various context including life stories devoted to sports.

Figure 3. An example of 1959's edition context. Translation: “There were 20 comrades of mine. All of them, before being included in the expedition, underwent a strict medical commission, and gave the impression of heroes capable of overcoming any difficulties. The first impression was not deceived: with the exception of two - they were over 50 - almost all were sportsmen-dischargers, had good skiing, played soccer, volleyball, table tennis, and performed complex exercises with gymnastic apparatus.”

In 1931, however, mostly physical education and policy devoted to it have been discussed, so the focus from sports was shifted to physical education in those editions.

Figure 4. An example of 1931 edition.

Translation: “I note the complete lack of accounting in the field of physical education and at the same time its crucial importance, the State Planning Committee of the USSR and the Supreme Council of Physical Education at the Central Executive Committee of the USSR are jointly conducting a continuous examination of physical education organizations. We believe that issues of the current state of planning of physical education and its long-term plans and plans for scientific research in the field of physical education should be thoroughly discussed at the All-Union scientific-planning congress on physical education, working vacations, spa business and tourism, which is supposed to be convened in November of that year.”

But, despite these certain points, the trends were different: somewhere in the 1950s, there was a turning point after which the grouping sports started to grow in coverage and the individual were no longer the most covered ones. This information coincides well with the hypothesis about changing trend connected with the entrance in the International Olympic Committee, as it was described in Introduction and Literature Review sections. Now it is important to prove statistically that these differences were actually present in texts.

Firstly, I will conduct ANOVA test for set of periods. I will gather some years and divide them onto three periods: Stalinism (1928-1953); Post-Stalin era (1954-1979) and Later USSR and Perestroika (1980-1991). The decision to split the dates on these categories is explained by the fact that the end of the Stalin's period has come approximately in the same time as the entrance of the USSR into International Olympic Committee (1953 & 1951), and the changes caused by both this events can be a reason for the changes in sport journals discourse. Another reason for this division is the lack of data in some of the periods: some years are covered less detailed, which means that for observations to not be highly dispersed it is important to join the data in approximately equal sets, so the statistical tests will be more precise. However, if all the data were present, it would be better to split the periods of Khrushchev and Brezhnev apart, because they were still characterized by different politics. But overall, those three periods can characterize the following: higher militarization and outside world closeness in Stalinism; de-Stalinization and relative openness in post-Stalinism and more democratic and liberal period of 1980s and perestroika. With that, I suppose that the differences of media coverage of individual and team sports and games will be statistically different in selected periods. The units of analysis are the proportions of the words to the number of words in the whole text as it was described in the section before the graphs.

The first test was conducted in the set with the individual games:

Figure 5. The results of the ANOVA test for individual games in different time periods of USSR.

And the results have showed that there is no significant difference in media representation of individual games throughout the time in the USSR, because the F-Value is close to the 1 and the P-Ratio is higher than 0.05. However, the results for the team games are different:

Figure 6. The results of the Tukey post-hoc test for ANOVA conducted for team games in different periods of the USSR.

We can see that the differences between Stalinism and other time periods are significant, which means that in Stalin's era the media coverage was relatively lower than the one in “Post-Stalinist” and “Late USSR's” times.

The next step of the analysis is comparing the individual sports games and team games with each other, and for that the Chi-Square will be used. In this step I will be using frequencies of the words, meaning that here the proportion of the words divided by the number of words in document will not be used. For Chi-Square analysis the contingency table needs to be built and on the graph there is a contingency table implemented in the analysis:

Figure 7. Contingency table of sport-related terms for different sports types in selected USSR periods.

In this table we can see that generally both categories were covered more in Stalinism era, but it can be caused by the bigger amount of data gathered for this period. The results of the Chi-Square are pictured below:

Figure 8. Output of the Chi-Square test conducted for different sports types in selected USSR periods.

The output says that there are significant differences in the media coverage of the sports types, and to understand the nature and extent of the differences it is needed to analyze the residuals:

On the graph it is seen that the observed values in individual sports section are higher that expected ones in Stalin period. The observed values related to team sports and games are, however, significantly lower. The situation is different in late USSR and perestroika times: team games are mentioned less than individual ones. The situation in post-Stalin era is the most balanced ones and there is no significant difference in the representation of two types of games.

Figure 9. Pearson residuals for the Chi-Square test conducted for different sports types in selected USSR periods.

These results prove the first hypothesis of the study, saying that the coverage of the sports games has indeed changed with the time: even though the individual games are mentioned more often in general, the relative difference can be seen in the analysis. And in the late USSR even the cumulative amount of team games and sports mentions was higher than the one for the individual sports. It means that based on the analysis of the “Physical Education and Sports” journal, the Stalin era was characterized by the higher attention paid to the individualism in sports, whereas with times the preference in media coverage shifted towards teamplay based games.

It is also important to notice that based on the graphs from the beginning (Figure 1.), (Figure 2.), the Olympic games that could have the boosting effects did not have one, because the peaks of the sports and games mentions were not the years of the Olympic Games conducted (1960, 1964, 1980, 1984, 1988).

Based on this observation, it can be said, that the hypothesis about mediating effect of the Olympic Games cannot be proved. However, it can be checked if the overall Olympic Games coverage was low in all periods of USSR. It could help to trace the priority of the Olympic Games in the sports media, because this priority cannot be stated from the analysis conducted in the first section. In order to explore the coverage of the Olympic Games, I have selected the words from open corpora dictionary that reflect the Olympic Games in any forms as it was done with the team and individualistic games. Then, I combined data with the tokenized version of “Physical Education and Sports” data and divided the number of mentions of the Olympic Games by the number of words in the document. After that, I have conducted the same operation with “Athletics” and “Soccer. Hockey” journals, because the first journal better reflects individualistic sports, and the second one reflects the team sports, and these journals are covering the post-Stalin and late periods of USSR better, so the year of the Olympic Games will be seen better.

On the graph there is an line chart reflecting the media coverage of the Olympic Games in “Physical Education and Sports” journal:

Figure 10. Changes of the Olympic Games coverage in "Physical Education and Sports" journal.

Here we can see the positive trend in media coverage in post-Stalin Soviet Union, which by the mid-1980s changes to negative, falling almost to the pre-war era. It is also seen that after the USSR joined the Olympic Committee and started to take part in Olympic Games, the media coverage of these events rose. The years of the Olympic Games are colored in red and it is seen that they mark the peaks on the graph, signifying about the highest rates of the Olympic Games coverage in media. The highest peak on the graph is related to the Olympic Games in 1980 which were held by the Soviet Union, and the lowest rate among years of the Olympic Games is depicted in 1984, when the Olympic Games were boycotted by the USSR. This rate is even lower than the rate of the Olympic Games held in Germany in 1936, even though the USSR did not take part in those games as well. But the important detail is that even in 1988, when USSR took part in the Olympic Games and won the golden medal, the rate of the coverage was still relatively small, and this rate kept falling in further years, signifying about changing priorities of the sports media. To check it statistically, I have conducted an ANOVA test between different periods for the same groups as in the first section. The results of the analysis are illustrated in plot:

Figure 11. ANOVA test of the Olympic Games mentions for different time periods in the "Physical Education and Sports" journal

We can see that there were significant changes in the Olympic Games coverage between Stalin era and other two periods. And the difference between the 1980s and perestroika is lower than the one with the post-Stalin period. And at the same time, we cannot statistically prove that the Olympic Game were not covered that much in the late period of the USSR, even though on the graph the trend seems to exist. That could be due to the fact that in the 1980s there was a huge peak in 1980 that contributed to the overall picture of 1980s.

Now I will be looking at the results from the Athletics journal, and here is the graph of the media coverage of the Olympic Games for this magazine:

Figure 12. Changes in the Olympic Games media coverage in "Athletics" journal.

It is seen that in “Athletics” journal the Olympic Games also had a boosting effect in coverage. Same as with “Physical Education and Sports”, the highest rate was in the 1980 because of the Moscow Olympic Games. Also, the similarity is that the lowest rate was in the 1984 which, again, can be explained by the USSR's boycott of those games. But the main common part of both graphs is that in 1980s and 1990s the coverage of the Olympic Games has started to fall in “Athletics” journal as well. This can mean that the Olympic Games did not have this high priority as they had in post-Stalin Soviet Union. The ANOVA test was also conducted to test if the time-difference of the Olympic games mentions was statistically significant. For the ANOVA test in “Athletics” and “Soccer. Hockey” I have chosen the different periods because, from one hand, those journals do not cover Stalin periods because they were not launched back then, but at the same time they provide less sparse coverage for the later periods of the USSR, which means that the later periods of the USSR can be divided in other way. I have chosen the following time periods: “Thaw and Stagnation” (1955-1970); “Late USSR” (1971-1984)' “Perestroika” (1985-1991). These periods can also reflect the following historical and sporting changes in the USSR: first winnings in the Olympic Games and active stage of the Cold War in first period; the preparation for the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980 and boycott of the Olympic Games in 1984; the perestroika and westernized course of the Soviet Union in 1985-1991. The results for the following periods are illustrated:

Figure 13. ANOVA test of the Olympic Games mentions for different time periods in the "Athletics" journal, P.value =0.04

It is seen that the Olympic games started to be less covered in the period of Perestroika compared to the Late USSR, however within other group there were not such differences found. Still, it can be said that during the perestroika the Olympic Games were not covered that often in “Athletics” journal, compared to the period from 1971 to 1984.

To make a conclusion, I also took into account “Soccer. Hockey” journal, and here are the results for this magazine:

Figure 14. Changes in the Olympic Games media coverage in "Soccer. Hockey" journal.

And same as on the previous results, the years of the Olympic games have the boosting effect in the coverage. Unlike in Athletics and “Physical Education and Sports” journals, the 1984 year did not fall in terms of coverage. I have checked the context of the 1984 edition and this result can be explained by the success of the hockey team in winter Olympic Games, because the winter Olympic Games in Saraevo were not boycotted by the USSR. Also, this graph is different in this meaning that the coverage of the Olympic Games is steady throughout the time, and there is some small increase in late 1980s and 1990s. Probably, it can be referred to the proven above overall rising coverage of the team sports to which soccer and hockey belong. Another noticeable difference is that overall in “Soccer. Hockey” journal the Olympic Games are not mentioned that often, because the highest points for both “Athletics” and “Physical Education and Sports” journals approximately stand for 8, whereas in “Soccer. Hockey” the highest point is slightly above 2. Still, I have conducted ANOVA test to see if there are any significant changes in “Soccer. Hockey” journal:

sport propaganda olympic medal

Figure 15. ANOVA test of the Olympic Games mentions for different time periods in the "Soccer.Hockey" journal

There it is seen that the Olympic Games are distributed equally throughout the time and there is no significant changes in presented journal, as it was seen from the graph.

Below I have made a table showing the overall results of the tests conducted: first, second and third periods for “Physical Education and Sports” journal stand for “Stalinism, Post-Stalinism, 1980s and Perestroika”, and for “Athletics” and “Soccer. Hockey” it stands for “Thaw and Stagnation, Late USSR and Perestroika”.

Figure 16. Table resulting overall differences in Olympic Games coverage for different journals. "TRUE" stand for the statistical presence of difference, "FALSE" stand for the statistical absence of difference

With this analysis, it can be supposed that the importance of the Olympic Games in Soviet society was higher in 1960s and 1970s, and started to fall somewhere in the second half of the eighties. And it can be seen that most of the time it was not beneficial for the Soviet sports journals to cover the Olympic Games if the athletes from USSR do not participate there. But it is only the descriptive section related to media coverage and the data is not enough to prove the actual influence of the Olympic Games completely, thus the further analysis is required to test the hypothesis.

I also have built graphs for all of the sports separately and they could be seen in Appendix section. There it is easier to see the moving trends in the coverage of different sports with time. (Figure 28 - Figure 39). For example, it is seen, that the entrance of the USSR in the FIFA organization in 1947 which was described in the Literature Review did not have a big boosting effect on the coverage of the Soccer in soviet sports media (Figure 28).

Topic Modeling

Out of 400 topics, I have selected fourth the most controversial topics which could be changing throughout the time in Soviet sports journals. I have labeled these topics as “Militarism”; “Stalin, Lenin and communistic propaganda”; “Money, Finance and Capitalism”; “Foreign Countries (mostly western”). On the table below there are top 10 word characterizing these topics, the names of the topics shortened for the better readability:

Figure 17. The table containing top 10 words of selected topics.

For the analysis, I have used the proportion of the selected topics in different years and illustrated it on the graphs. All of the journals combined were used in this section, because there is no bias based on any sports games described, thus the general agenda can be checked. Here is the result for the “Militarism” topic:

Figure 18. The timeline of the changes of "Militarism" topic in different years in sports journals

On this graph there is obvious peak in 1941 year, caused by the Germany's intervention in USSR, and there are some peaks during the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars. Another peak is seen in 1963, but this year the edition of the journal contained mostly materials devoted to the “The Great Patriotic War”. We can see that 1950s were relatively peaceful for the USSR's journals, but starting from the 1960 the proportion of the military topic in texts rose and started to fluctuate highly at some points. To test the hypothesis that the military theme was changing in coverage in different time periods I used the ANOVA test. This time, knowing that the data consists of three journals and 1950s-1990s are covered better, I have selected four time periods: “Stalinism” (1928-1953); “Thaw and Stagnation” (1954-1970); “Late USSR” (1971-1984); “Perestroika” (1985-1991). Here is the result for “Militarism”:

As we can see, the militarism was not changing statistically in different time periods, so we cannot say for sure that sports media of the USSR was more military-oriented in different time periods, even despite the fact that the physical education in 1920s and 1930s said to have a military orientation.

Figure 19. ANOVA test for "Militarism" topic conducted on sports journals corpus.

But here are the results for the “Socialism propaganda” topic chronological distribution:

Figure 20. The timeline of the changes of "Socialism" topic in different years in sports journals

Here we have one really big peak in 1938 year and it can be seen that in the period of de-Stalinization and later USSR the topic has started to be significantly less covered. And there are also the results for the ANOVA test for “Socialism” topic:

Figure 21. ANOVA test for "Socialism" topic conducted on sports journals corpus.

I also conducted the ANOVA test without the document from 1938 because it is the outlier that could spoil the statistical test's result:

Figure 22. ANOVA test for "Socialism" topic conducted on sports journals corpus, outlier excluded.

In both versions we can clearly see a big difference in the coverage of the “socialism” topics: the earlier periods of the USSR tended to pay more attention to this theme, however the later periods including Khrushchev's thaw do not differ statistically in the representation of this topic, most of the documents of later periods almost do not contain this theme inside.

Next, there is a line chart showing the difference in the representation of “capitalism” topic:

Figure 23. The timeline of the changes of "Money and Capitalism" topic in different years in sports journals

On the graph we can clearly see a huge boost of the topic coverage in the later 1980s and 1990s. It can be easily explained by the steady shifting to the market system during the Perestroika times, but we can also see that this topic was relatively covered in late 1920s, but decreased in coverage later, and only in the 1960s this theme was more widespread across the sports journals. The ANOVA test for this topic is presented below:

Figure 24. ANOVA test for "Capitalism" topic conducted on sports journals corpus.

The test shows that the topic “Money and Capitalism” was statistically more discussed in Perestroika times compared to all other periods. However, between the other periods there is no statistically significant difference pictured, even though on the graph it looked like the topic was more popular in Thaw and Late USSR times than in the Stalinism times.

And on the last line chart there is a graph representing the changes in the “Western countries” topic:

Figure 25. The timeline of the changes of "Western countries" topic in different years in sports journals

We can see a trend here that with time the media coverage of western countries is changing, and it can be seen that until the 1960s there were almost no mentions of other countries, but after that time the coverage rose significantly. It can be explained by several hypotheses: first, the entrance in the Olympic Games played its role and journals started to cover other countries as the main rivalries of the Soviet Union in international competitions. Second, probably the journal's orientation shifted from physical education and fitness oriented to the image of sports events bulletin. And the last hypothesis is that the media started to be more open regarding illustrations of other countries: either for discreditation purposes or in more tolerant attitudes. There is an ANOVA test result for the confirmation of the changes:

Figure 26. ANOVA test for "Western countries" topic conducted on sports journals corpus.

We can see that all of the time periods, except for the Perestroika and Late USSR differ statistically in terms of the “Western countries” topic representation. It means that this shift in the representation started somewhere in the Khrushchev's late era and kept rising in later periods, whereas in the Stalinism era the coverage of western countries was low.