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.