Interview: Dr. Bob Edelman on Sports and Politics in Ukraine and Russia

In this episode, Brenda Elsey interviews Dr. Robert Edelman, professor of Russian history and the history of sport at the University of California San Diego. They discuss the Russian and Ukrainian sports communities’ responses to the invasion, how athletes and fans might turn the tide of sportswashing and the ways sports can both reveal and and mask geopolitical conflict.

This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.

Transcript

Brenda: Welcome to Burn It All Down. It's the feminist sports podcast you need. I'm Brenda Elsey, and I'm really excited today to be talking with Dr. Bob Edelman. He's a professor of Russian history and the history of sports at University of California, San Diego. And he's been kind enough to share with us some of his expertise, given the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, and we're going to talk about its relationship to sports, solidarity in sports, athlete activism, et cetera. So, welcome to the show, Bob. 

Bob: It's great to see you. It's great to be here. But right now I'm wearing Chornomorets Odesa shirt for their soccer team there. 

Brenda: Okay. So, I wanted to start off…There’s there's a few places that we could start, but I'd like to start off with this one particular athlete that we're hearing a lot about, who is a striker for Dynamo, Fyodor Smolov.

Bob: Oh, sure.

Brenda: Who plays for the Russian national team and was one of the first, that we read, from Russia to speak out against the invasion. I'm wondering how common that is, what effect you think that type of activism has, or your reactions to that? 

Bob: I know him well. I know his game well. I know the strengths and weaknesses of that game. [laughs] And I was surprised. I really didn't know anything about him as a political actor at all. It's the only case that I've seen so far, but I don't think it's going to be that extensive among Russian players. I am interested, let's say, in what the foreign players on these various teams are going to be doing in the near future. I watched yesterday Spartak, a team I've written about, play the central army team CSKA, lose 2-0, and all of their foreign players were there, right? So, that's going to be something that's interesting to watch in terms of activity or activism, or just response to obviously what I would call crushing political pressure. 

Brenda: And, you know, when you see players speak out, whether they're playing on foreign teams or within the Russian league, is this something that you're immediately concerned for their safety, or do they have enough notoriety that you think they have a degree of safety?

Bob: I've been talking to my Russian friends, some who are fairly active in these events, and they seem somewhat sanguine about it. But I've been focusing really on the Russian piece of the puzzle in terms of the domestic opposition to the war, and I don't know yet that people who are involved in it, even people on the streets, are definitely afraid for that personal safety. I mean, they expect to be taken off the street, perhaps at worst spend a couple of days in jail. At least that's for now. If things continue to turn for the worse domestically there in terms of the economic situation and maybe even something ghastly like the nuclear situation, I can only imagine what would happen. 

Brenda: And right now, all of these bodies, whether it's UEFA being pressured, or FIFA to pull out from Russia, to sanction them to, you know, not hold tournaments…Do you think that that is efficacious? Do you think Putin will care? Could it backfire? What do you think when you hear that?

Bob: Well, that's a great question. So, we're here because we all believe that there's a connection between sport and politics, and we want to believe that somehow sport can have an impact on that. And sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. And, you know, we want to justify what we're doing for a living by virtue of the fact that we believe it would, but I've been very careful about, and actually somewhat surprised, because Infantino, the head of FIFA, was very closely tied to, comfortable with Putin, paid a great deal of attention to him during the World Cup in 2018, which was the last time I was in Russia. And so I was surprised that they moved that quickly. I mean, I'm trying to kind of think of another situation historically in sport where there was a nation that had been excluded. And we're talking about South Africa and the dithering with which the IOC and FIFA and other federations approach that situation. 

I thought, well, maybe we'll find that here because they're invested in them through things like Gazprom, which is a very big player in supporting the Champions League and other things. UEFA is complicit here as well. So I think it has an impact on public opinion inside Russia, but how much I can't say. But it's worth at least doing, in terms of whether you are a moral person or not and you are outraged by what's going on in Ukraine. That's a place I've spent a lot of time. And so I would like to believe that it has an impact. But in the short term, probably not so much, but in the long-term I think that definitely is part of what people have to understand in Russia, that there are costs to what their government is doing.

Brenda: I mean, have you seen much reaction within Russia? We've seen some images and things of Russians protesting domestically. Have you been able to see much of that? 

Bob: Yeah, I inhale it as much as I possibly can, because it's what gives me hope. My closest friend, the guy who is translating my book into Russian, has been out on the streets. And one of the things that has been somewhat chilling is that some of these demonstrations are taking place at the Mayakovsky place, which is on the main street of Tverskaya, and that was a short walk from where I lived in many occasions when I've been in Russia. And so it brought it home, and I don't know what others are going to be doing. And I have to be careful about my communication with them, and I also am terribly saddened by the fact that I'm probably not going to go back there in the short term. I was supposed to give lectures to a Russian University on Zoom in a couple of months, and that's not going to happen. 

Brenda: In terms of…I mean, we just finished the Olympic cycle, right? We just saw these athletes compete as part of the Russian Federation, but technically sanctioned so they're not supposed to represent Russia per se. I mean, did all of the sportswashing that's taken place from 2018, the attempts to kind of present…Even before that with Sochi, right? Like, presenting Russia in a particular light. Has that been effective in promoting Putin’s image as maybe a more reasonable or likable figure? Or do you think that it doesn't have any effect?

Bob: You know, they do these things and we know that nations search out to be hosting mega events as part of their own branding process and attempting to appear prestigious and gain international prestige. Then you have something like Sochi where, you know, they put on this Games that were not devoid of protest, as some of you know. Pussy Riot was a presence in some of the activities there. They maybe gain a certain bit of acceptance as a result of this, of appearing to be normal. And then they go into Crimea, right? [laughs] Shortly thereafter. And then shortly thereafter that we find out this massive doping scandal. That was something that truly squandered whatever goodwill that they may have acquired as a result of these various mega events. 

Brenda: And do you think the reason that they just continue to be able to compete…I mean, is it just sort of power over the European institutions and the global ones? 

Bob: So, they have been players in that world, the world of international sports federations and all the rest of that, and they have been the host of numbers of events, like track and field back in 2013, which we now know was also marred by doping of the Russian team. And it says something about the moral ambiguity of the people who run these federations – and I include the IOC and FIFA as federations – that they're willing to put up with that in order to find good platforms for their own activities. And there's a sort of mutual usefulness of both sides to do this. 

Brenda: Does that elaborate doping scandal speak to the importance of sports somehow, to Russian nationalism and political power? Or is this something different?

Bob: That's a good question, because Russian nationalism has always historically been a kind of slippery concept, and it's not the kind of knee jerk nationalism that we may associate with other countries either in Europe or other parts of the world, partially because it was always part, the Soviet Union was part and the Russian Federation even, was a multinational empire. This is not a uniformly Russian place, even now, despite the fact that so many of these national republics have split off and are now in their own separate nations with as you can see fairly precarious relations with larger Soviet Russian mass. But Russia itself, even a place like Moscow, is filled with Ukrainians. It's filled with Armenians. It's filled with Georgians, dare I say. 

And so, how that plays into Russian nationalism is very mixed, and Russian nationalism I say is complicated because on one level they seek to use Russian nationalism to bind these non-Russian entities and social groups or cultural groups within their borders and get them to be supporters of the government. On the other hand, when they do this, of course it undermines that. And so I'm wondering what it means now to be Ukrainian, Ukrainian connected personally to what's going on in Ukraine itself, and then living in Russia at this moment is something I would not envy. 

Brenda: So, to back up for a minute, walk us through, for people who don't know, including me, following the fall of the Soviet Union, we know that asdifferent countries gained independence, they gained kind of sports status. And we're assuming that that was an important piece of their, you know, that to Ukrainian nationalism, it was important to have independent sports organizations. 

Bob: Exactly. And in fact, the Ukrainian football federation pulled out of the Soviet league in 1990. That is a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union. And they were really the first to form their own league, which was a mixed success. Dynamo Kyiv, at least at that point, initially dominated enormously over these other smaller towns and places where they didn't even have stadiums that we would call adequate for so-called big time football. Sometimes people described it as village football. On the other hand, it has evolved into a league of some substance, and the quality of the players is passable. But the Soviet Union collapses; when it does collapse, along the lines of the various nations that were part of the various republics, which are themselves not necessarily uniformly…Well, let's say Georgian – not everybody living in Georgia is Georgian, because other nationalities, other cultural groups that are part of that same thing. 

In Armenia, same thing. Certainly in Ukraine, and even in the Baltic countries. And the Baltic countries came out of the Soviet league shortly after the Ukrainians did. Again, this is before the collapse of the Soviet Union. And so when the Soviet Union comes apart, it goes from one big country to 14 smaller countries and one big obviously highly problematic country as we see now. And so the process by which those nations used football, use soccer to brand themselves and to achieve an international visibility is a very interesting one and part of what happened during the nineties and the aughts.

Brenda: Is there a difference in the way that they used soccer, football, versus the way that they used Olympic sports? Or should we understand this as the same, you know, giant sports bodies?

Bob: That's a really good question, because I've argued in my own work that there's a very fundamental difference between the Olympic sports and the football, because you have in an Olympic sport the nation being, ever since 1908, has been the fundamental unit by which people participate. And so that process of being part of the Olympic movement involves an organization on a national level. With football, we have clubs that emerged from social groups and other workplace situations and things like that, which have maybe different classes of bases of support, different supporter bases. And those complicate the whole question of national unity. 

So I spent time in Kyiv, and it was a time when Spartak I remember played one particular game and did quite well in the UEFA Cup match, and the bartender who I was talking to said, well, you know, good for Spartak. And so at one level there's a kind of a mutual respect; on another, there’s tremendous, violent, often violent tension between say fans of Dynamo Kyiv and fans of Spartak in their respective cities when one team or another visited. So, it has been something that has been, again, a centrifugal force for a long time, and continues to be that. 

Brenda: Are there any clubs that are identified specifically as anti-authoritarian or anti-Putin. 

Bob: I wrote this book about Spartak Moscow, which of course had something like that position in the Soviet period, but it has changed. And now it's kind of a hotbed of Russian nationalists, and you sometimes see American Confederate flags flying in their fan sections on road games, and it's very saddening to me as someone who kind of saw them as a kind of island of hope in an otherwise sometimes dismal sea of what the Soviet Union was at times. And so Spartak, yes, but now it's really hard to say. And certainly, you know, the ownership of those teams and the people who control those teams has become more complicated, and it tends to be people in the business world who are doing that, even though you have a team like Dynamo, which is formally part of the secret police and the state security. You have the army team CSKA, and then you have Spartak, which is basically now a kind of private company.

Brenda: And speaking of ownership, another thing that we've seen coming out during this conflict is the idea of, you know, economic sanctions, holding assets of Russians abroad. And Chelsea, which plays in the Premier League, has come up as one of those, because Abramovich is the owner of Chelsea and he's now temporarily tried to give it to the charitable foundation. 

Bob: Right. I was just reading about that this morning. 

Brenda: Yeah. What do you think about that?

Bob: Well, it's a kind of next step of a processes that has really for him been going on for quite some time. I mean, he is not someone who's allowed to spend time safely in the United Kingdom at this point. So you don't see him at the games. He's in Israel part of the time or I guess he's on his yacht a lot of the time. And so he's been pulling away, whatever that might mean, at least on the overt official level, for some time. And this is a kind of further step, obviously because of the actions of the Russian elites, of which he of course is a part. He is a walking, talking, 100% oligarch, and acquired his wealth under somewhat murky circumstances back in the 1990s. So, I was just reading about this, and this is something that starts in 2003, becomes part of this process by which we now see Man City and, you know, who knows what, who else owning what, where? 

And so I am not sure I fully understand what his relationship is to Chelsea Football Club at this point. But certainly it's something that I would doubt he is really totally separate from their decision-making process. Somebody I was reading just in the Guardian about how what's going to happen now, is the charitable foundation going to decide who to play at center forward? They're going to acquire somebody new? You know, they're gonna raise ticket prices? Are they going to name a new manager? You know, those types of things that are up in the air right now. And then they lost the Carabao Cup final yesterday. So, [laughs] serves them right.

Brenda: Well, do you think this really hurts? I mean, because ultimately we're asking all of this and we're talking about all of this because we're pretty horrified about what's happening in Ukraine. Is there any way in which this is effective, these types of actions, in deterring Russian aggression?

Bob: Well, it hasn’t. [laughs] So, they got a thing that can deter Russian aggression, which is the very brave fighters in Ukraine right now. It's it's going to be hard and I hope they can get some kind of at least temporary agreement with these talks that are going on now. I’m not sure. Of course everybody is terribly impressed by Zelenskyy who seemed to be such a kind of beaten down figure at the time of the whole Trump phone call episode now appears to be really quite an impressive person. He's a wonderful actor. Some of you know him as a comedian, but he has really stepped into a different role. And I guess he knows how to play a role, and role he's playing is a national savior, and to the extent that we hope he stays alive and manages to somehow get out of this with his skin and the nation’s skin.

There are things that we can, in our own sphere – limited as it is, limited as we are in terms of our ability as academics to impact anybody's foreign policy or anybody's domestic policy. We do it, and in our bit of the world, we make a stand and we bring our moral, political and cultural concerns to what we do. And that's in fact how we justify it. The tricky part about sports history of course is – I don’t have to tell you, Brenda – is that there was a time in sports history writing when we tried to justify doing it by saying that sports and politics did mix, you know, and that sport reflected the larger society. Then one thing we've learned, I suspect, in the last say 10 years or so, is that sports can also mask historical and political realities. 

And certainly the idea that you hold an Olympics in a place like Sochi and invest in all of the sort of problematic morality of the International Olympic Committee, and then simply behind the scenes doing things that are utterly opposite to those, let's say poorly held beliefs, are, you know, undermining that. And so, you know, the Soviet Union back in the day was good at the Olympics, but it didn't mean that they were a stronger, more powerful nation than the United States. They were just better at that particular, very circumscribed platform. One of which has an interesting, of course, gender component in terms of the way they were able to deploy women's sports in the Olympic context. And obviously not so much in the football context.

Brenda: If you're a person who is just listening to all the news cycle right now, watching these horrifying images, what do you think, if anything, we're not getting? You know, what are we missing in terms of understanding Ukrainian history, anything?

Bob: Well, some of that stuff is not...Some of what people are not getting are this problem where there was an article recently I was reading about how this problem of we're caught here between massive false myths and lies, especially with what the Russians are saying now about what's going on in Ukraine, and the complicated history of the west and the way in which the Cold War ended is something that is not simple and troubling for people of goodwill – that's a euphemism, I suppose. But having said that,  this was a place that now has a Jewish president. But some of the anti-Semitic past of Ukraine, its collaboration with the Nazis back in World War II or things that, you know, still are things that one has to think about, but not of course change one's fundamental sympathy now.

But having said that, here we have this likable Jewish fella who's now the president of Ukraine – who would have thought that, right? On the other hand, we had this likable Black man, you know, who was the president of the United States, and of course racism somehow didn't disappear! So, I feel complicated terms of their past history, but you know, having spent time there and understood the differences even back in the Soviet period, that one understands their willingness to take these kinds of chances. 

But I, for one, hope that they can hold out enough that the international community can continue to harm the Russian economy, and as such fan and foment descent and agreement in the Russian case. So, I'm looking as much as I can at those people in the streets in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and hopefully…These demonstrations are not as big as the ones in 2011 after the elections, and that of course didn't change things, but we just have to have hope. 

Brenda: For those of us who want to follow them, I mean, where do we look to find out what's happening on the streets there? Where do you try to figure this out?

Bob: Well, for sports, there's a very good website called sports.ru, and if you go on it, you're offered an English translation of everything that's on there. And they've been fairly explicit in saying what's happened. They haven't hidden the fact that Spartak will probably not play Leipzig in the Europa Cup, and things like that. You know, they've covered the fact that the Champions League final has been taken away from St. Petersburg and given to Paris. And so the people who work there I think are fairly clear-eyed and honest. And so that's a place where people can look in terms of how it plays out in sports. I think there's another sports site called sport-express.ru which is the old newspaper that my friends used to work at and I spent a lot of time being part of. I think they have an English translation for their site as well. 

Brenda: Cool. Thank you. Is there anything else I haven't asked that you think I should, or that you want to talk about? 

Bob: We need to understand what the past history was in terms of things like the way that the Soviet Union collapsed, and that was replaced by a different regime that was containing Russian/Soviet expansion during the 20th century. The way the Soviet Union collapsed was nonviolent because of the promises made to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand at these Eastern European countries like Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, et cetera, would not become part of NATO. And they of course have. That is what has been driving Putin, and he in fact said the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest strategy of the 20th century. Some may disagree with that. Certainly most of us would. 

You know, so, I worry about the fact that if I raise these issues and say here on these things that are troubling me to argue that maybe we have to see what our own role was, what NATO's role was in this time that we've come to, doesn't mean that I in any way approve of what's happening now or try to apologize for it. So, I feel a lot of conflict there in terms of my own view of history and in terms of what's going on now, 

Brenda: That’s a general theme of this show – nuance, contradiction. [laughter] You know it came up this week on our show, we discussed this, and it was brought up the concept of an Olympic truce, and–

Bob: Oh gosh, yes.

Brenda: [laughs] Okay. And what's your reaction to that?

Bob: As we say in scientific circles, the Olympic truce is a pile of crap. 

Brenda: There you go! [laughs] That was my reaction.

Bob: So, the Olympic truce was not that they stopped the war, right? And what happened was is that during an Olympic Games, athletes had the right to travel to Olympia from other parts of the ancient Greek empire safely, but it didn't mean that war stopped or may have abated at some point. But this idea, to take things that happened in the ancient world, which the Olympics of course embraces and uncritically embraces the classical world of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and then tries to apply that to the present, and you'll get something that's completely ridiculous. 

So, I remember working at the Olympics in 1998 for CBS, and then I forget what war was going on at that point in time. And one Antonio Samaranch was again saying, oh, the Olympic Games are a force for peace, and therefore we can have our Olympic truce, and please see to it that it is enforced. Which of course it hasn't. So, you know, I think the entire Olympic apparatus is in fact something that emerges as – I don't have to tell you – not from ancient Greece but in fact from the British public schools and British sport as it was organized and developed in the 19th century in Great Britain. 

And this is what in fact inspired Coubertin originally, and what he was trying to do in terms of bringing in the ancient Greece part of the puzzle was that he needed the Germans to be part of his enterprise. And at that point in time, there was enormous philhellenism. Germans were all over contemporary Greece, doing archeological digs and stealing treasures and bringing them to their museums, et cetera, et cetera. And in order to get the Germans on board, Coubertin had to make reference to the ancient Greek tradition that was being revived by the Olympic Games. But in fact, it was something that was a lot more problematic because after all, remember, the initial Olympic Games in 1896 did not have women and did not have working people. 

Brenda: Yeah. So, just what you're speaking to right now, I mean, this reflection, when it came up, I sort of said, you know, I mean, does the US, having invaded Afghanistan, you know, and been for decades in Iraq? I mean… [laughs]

Bob: I mean, yeah, right? The idea that the United States would violate some independent nation's borders, of course, it never could’ve happened, right? 

Brenda: [laughs] So in that sense, what I'm trying to bring out is that these reflections don't actually come from a place of “Who cares about Putin” or “Who cares about Ukraine” but actually the opposite, which is, you know, we're trying to interrogate all the ways in which people are complicit, including the country that we live in. And it comes from a place of deep empathy. And sometimes I think when you get academics on to certain shows and we just tear into US foreign policy, it seems hard for us to make the point, or it's rare to have the time to make the point that this isn't about just taking blame into one government and away from Putin, but instead it's about looking at the entire sort of relationships and contradictions. 

Bob: Yeah, if not us, who?

Brenda: [laughs] That’s right. That's right. That's why we get paid the big bucks, Bob. 

Bob: That's the big bucks!

Brenda: [laughs] It’s the glamorous academic lifestyle you've all heard of. 

Bob: Yeah, right.

Brenda: Well, professor Bob Edelman, thank you so much for being on Burn It All Down. We really appreciate your time, and share your deep concern with Ukrainians, and as much solidarity as we can always impossibly muster. 

Bob: Thanks for inviting me. Thanks for all the great questions. And I hope we can do it again sometime.