Paper long abstract:

In the past decades, the study of sport, particularly football (soccer) with its truly global and mass appeal, has gained greater credence as a field of academic inquiry, by providing insights into issues of class, race, gender, identity, commerce, and popular culture. But within the fields of Soviet and Eurasian studies, the study of sport and football remains relatively undeveloped, aside from the pioneering work of Robert Edelman and a few other scholars.

My paper will examine the ways in which the Soviet Football League (Vysshaia liga) (1936-1991) serves as a microcosm for the broader study of the Soviet nationalities question. The league's structure in many ways paralleled the USSR own's national structure. At the pinnacle (Class A or Top League), the strongest teams from Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Caucasus supplemented a larger cohort from the RSFSR, primarily teams from Moscow and Leningrad. The lower divisions regularly featured second-tier teams from the RSFSR, as well as teams from a broader spectrum of non-Russian republics, especially the five Central Asian republics, the Caucasus, and the Baltic republics.

The paper will touch on several football-related issues relevant to the larger nationalities question. First, it looks at the changing composition of the various tiers of the Soviet Football League, usually a result of promotion and relegation, but occasionally a product of administrative decisions by football bureaucrats in Moscow. Second, it examines the extent to which successful non-Russian teams, such as Georgia's Dinamo Tbilisi, provided safe channels for the expression of national identities. Related to this, it considers football rivalries within and among Soviet republics, such as the little-known, but important, "derby" between the Kazakhtan's Kairat Almaty and Uzbekistan's Pakhtakor Tashkent. Finally, the paper probes into the use by republican and regional leaders of football teams as symbols of status and power in the late Soviet period.

I will draw from sources I have been consulting for a biography of Lev Yashin, the legendary Soviet goalkeeper of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as preliminary research on the history of Dinamo Tbilisi. I also will incorporate information from the Soviet sport press (i.e. Sovetskii sport) and archival sources from the Soviet Football Federation and the State Committee for Sport, Goskomsport.

Paper long abstract:

Soviet Central Asia that had enjoyed representation during the 1947 New Delhi Conference (Asia Relations Conference), were uninvited to the 1955 Bandung Conference. The decision to exclude Central Asia seems politically-sound, since inviting the Central Asian republics would allow the Soviet Union to exert its influence on Asia and Africa seeking their own alternative path amidst US-USSR rivalry. However, this exclusion alarmed the Soviet centre that began promoting 'Asian-ness' of Central Asia in order to forge affinity with Asian and African nations gaining independence from European colonial rule. The Central Asian republics, on the other hand, constructed their 'localised' versions of socialist internationalism both as a strategy to channel the Soviet centre's influence and as a mean to consolidate their national identities in the cultural realm. This paper traces the activities of the Uzbek office of the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (SSOD) in the earlier years of the Cold War. The Uzbek office, which was the subordinate to the SSOD main office in Moscow, served as the republican-level cultural diplomacy agency. The Uzbek SSOD was in charge of disseminating positive images of Soviet Uzbekistan and building amicable relationship with foreign intellectuals. Therefore, the question of how to promote an economically-advanced and internationalist national image of Soviet Uzbekistan while repudiating the outside criticism towards Central Asia's colonial subordination to the Soviet Union was at the core of its operation. The agency's efforts remain key to understanding the outcomes and legacies of the Cold War that continue to shape post-communist Central Eurasia today.

Paper long abstract:

Driven by Stalin's interpretation of the "two-camps" theory, the Soviet Union largely avoided the UN's multilateral economic institutions and the normative foundations that underpinned them. Under Nikita Khrushchev however, Soviet diplomacy in the UN evolved in the tenor and scope of its interpretation of the international economic order, in ways that resonated with the South. It became a colorful rhetoric of anti-colonialism, resource exploitation and broader themes on trade. Khrushchev´s attendance of the 15th session of the General Assembly in 1960 marked an important phase of Moscow´s tenacity for pragmatism in the service of its economic interests.

Thus, this paper addresses a largely understudied aspect of the global economy by looking specifically at how the issue of natural resources was an integral part of this nexus. From this prism it will provide important context for the contesting stakes and the outcomes it triggered.

Notwithstanding the place of the Soviet Union as both a major natural resources producer and consumer, the current literature says little about how Moscow defined its interest and perceived its stake in the political economy of natural resources. Scholars routinely discuss the natural resources questions within the framework of the UN as a North-South dichotomy. By looking at the period 1960-1980 this paper highlights how Moscow's economic interest thrust it into a transient rhetorical alliance with the South, the significance of the positions it took and how the geopolitical imperatives of that period had marginal effects on eventual outcomes.

Hence this paper will argue Moscow found it in its interest to depart from Stalin´s narrow interpretation of the "two camps theory" by aligning with the South´s grievances with the international economic order. It addresses a central dilemma in how Moscow's interest in accessing natural resources from the South sometimes conflicted with the South's often diffuse range of interests. This study relies on archival documents from Soviet sources and the UN to explain the context of the complex intersection of Great Power interests, the development of the UN and the question of access, production and distribution of natural resources.