Twisting femininity. Women’s gymnastics in the Soviet Union, 1917-1991
Creators: name: Mukhamatulin, Timur
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2024

description: This dissertation explores the history of women’s gymnastics in the Soviet Union. Situated at the intersection of gender history and the histories of Soviet sports and the international Cold War, the dissertation shows the crucial role gymnastics held for evolving Soviet conceptions of womanhood both domestically and on the global stage. Women’s gymnastics was promoted in the early phase of Soviet rule as a mass movement, for collectivizing and emancipating aims. Mass displays of male and female gymnasts from all union republics parading in lockstep on Moscow’s Red Square served the goal of showcasing Soviet society’s unity and readiness for a coming war. Communist sports activists undertook particular efforts to implement the gymnastic movement in the Eastern and Southern peripheries of the Soviet state, part of their larger campaign to promote female emancipation and fight cultural “backwardness”. The catastrophic human losses of World War II engendered a conservative turn in Soviet gender politics, leading to the forming of a gender-specific, distinctly “women’s” gymnastic movement. Agility, grace, and external beauty became central concerns in the performance and assessment of a sport dominated by high-level male experts. Women’s gymnastics in the Soviet Union was strongly affected by the USSR’s entry into the international sports arena in the late 1940s. As international sports contests became part and parcel of the cultural Cold War, Soviet sports officials began to focus on small groups of elite gymnasts who would win medals to showcase the supremacy of the Soviet system. The desire to form the strongest gymnastic nation in the world often conflicted with ideas about Soviet womanhood which state officials simultaneously promoted for both domestic and international audiences.The 1970s were a golden age of Soviet women’s gymnastics. Athletes like Olga Korbut and Nelli Kim performed stunning technical feats while exuding feminine grace and became global celebrities. Their trips abroad were central for Soviet cultural diplomacy and the politics of Détente. Soviet women’s gymnastics turned into a global brand, prompting athletes and state leaders from many other nations to emulate the Soviet model.Soviet women’s gymnastics almost immediately lost its brand status with Korbut’s and Kim’s retirement from the athletic stage. During Perestroika, the discipline became a target of media criticism. Reports featured young female athletes who were literally and figuratively mutilated by their coaches. These girls turned into emblems of the inhumanity of the Soviet order as a whole. Over the course of Soviet history, the gymnastic discipline thus evolved from a symbol of women’s liberation to one of women’s subjugation.The dissertation contributes to existing histories of Soviet womanhood. It presents the process of Soviet, initially progressive, gender policies’ ossification not as a straightforward regression, but as a zigzag path filled with paradoxes and contradictions. The dissertation also complicates existing narratives about Soviet sports as a top-down process as it shows how coaches and sports experts exercised their own agency and were able to influence the course of women’s gymnastics. The dissertation challenges prevailing views of the cultural Cold War, according to which it was always the West that influenced the East, and not vice versa.The dissertation rests on a variegated source basis which includes archival documents from post-Soviet states, publications in sports newspapers and magazines, both local and central, visual coverage of gymnastic competitions, and oral history interviews with former Soviet athletes and coaches.