The Moscow Playbook: How Russia Used, Abused, and Transformed Sports in the Hunt for Power (443)

20:52Cold War Conversations:I think it's vital to record the firsthand accounts of people who lived and experienced the Cold War because it illustrates history in a way that a book never can. So thank you so much for the podcast. It's my favorite podcast and I look forward to it every week. to be like ronda and help to preserve these incredible stories of the cold war as a monthly or annual supporter you'll be able to listen ad free you'll become one of our community get the sought after cold war conversations drinks coaster as a thank you and you'll bask in the warm glow of knowing that you're helping to preserve cold war history Just go to coldwarconversations.com slash donate to find out more.

21:38Cold War Conversations:Now, getting Soviet women to compete more in the Olympics is obviously one angle. But I think what people forget, particularly nowadays, is the Olympics were supposed to be amateurs only. Professionals were not allowed to compete. but the soviets thought they could bend the rules there yes and this is one of the main points of

22:06Bruce Berglund:my book and this was really a starting point for this book my previous book was on the history of world ice hockey and i was doing research for that book in in the archives of the international olympic committee in switzerland and in the archive i came across the documents from the late 1940s early 1950s, when the Soviets were making their approaches to the IOC, inquiring about membership, inquiring about participation in the Olympics. And at that time, members of the International Olympic Committee were aware of the fact that Soviet sport was not amateur. And yet they were willing, one, the Soviets lied to the IOC and said, we will follow the rules.

22:54Bruce Berglund:We will follow your rules in regard to amateurism. But the IOC was also willing to turn a blind eye to the ways that the Soviets were essentially gaming the system. And the background to all of this, as I said earlier, the Soviet Union had quite a vibrant sport culture already before the Second World War. And in particular, Soviet football was very popular. So Soviet clubs would draw tens of thousands of fans in the major cities. And the Soviet clubs were typically associated with a factory or with the military or the local police. And so because football was so popular and because these factories and the military, they wanted to put the best possible club on the pitch, they would pay players.

23:46Bruce Berglund:And the way they did this is they didn't pay the player. They didn't sign the player to a playing contract. Instead, the player was given a position with the factory or with the military. They were on paper, at least they were an army officer. They were a factory worker when, in fact, their real job was playing football and they were paid well. So after the war in 1951, when the Soviet Union enters the International Olympic Committee, the IOC recognizes, OK, we know you've been paying your athletes in the past. This has to stop. And Nikolai Romanov, the head of the sport committee, says directly, oh, yeah, that's something we used to do, but we don't do that anymore.

24:31Bruce Berglund:Our athletes are workers, they're students, and they do sport on the side. They follow the amateur ideal in the same way that British athletes did, in the same way American athletes did in the 1950s, right? This expectation that sport was not your full-time livelihood. That was the IOC's requirement. so Romanov says to the IOC this is what we're doing we're following the rules when in fact the Soviets continued the system of paying athletes through the sponsoring factory through the sponsoring military units police units and so forth and in addition to that one of the things that Romanov creates during the 1950s is a system where the sport committee is directly paying and providing bonuses to the top athletes in the Soviet Union, those who compete internationally.

25:26Bruce Berglund:So when Soviet athletes start going to the Olympics in 1952, 1956, they're being paid. Their full-time job is to train in their specific sport year round. They receive a salary from the sport committee. And then if they receive a medal, they would receive a bonus from the sport committee. And the bonus would be anywhere from one to two times the average annual salary of a Soviet worker. So Soviet athletes were doing quite well in terms of their compensation. And this was at a time when the IOC required of athletes in the UK, in Western Europe, in North America, they required that they had to be strictly amateur.

26:11Bruce Berglund:The rule at that time, or the rule in the 1960s was that an athlete could not receive any kind of cash prize over $50. That would be a violation of their amateur status. The IOC said athletes cannot spend more than two weeks in dedicated training before the Olympic Games. That would be a violation of their amateur status. And meanwhile, at the same time, Soviet athletes were being paid handsomely. They were being paid bonuses and they were preparing throughout the year. in preparation for international competition. Yeah.

26:46Cold War Conversations:And the head of the IOC goes on a tour of the Soviet Union in 1954. And I'm presuming the Soviets just completely pull the wall over his eyes. Yes.

26:58Bruce Berglund:So the head of the IOC at this time was an American, Avery Brundage. He was the first former Olympic athlete to serve as president of the IOC. And Brundage is now something of a notorious figure in sport history for his, how to say, his support for the Nazis in the lead up to the 1936 Olympics, for his handling of the 1972 Olympics in Munich. So this is at the very beginning of Brundage's term as IOC president, his 20-year term as president. And he decides to go to the Soviet Union. He's invited to the Soviet Union by Romanov to see what Soviet sport is like. And as you said, the Soviets pull the wool over his eyes.

27:44Bruce Berglund:They give him information. They talk about how many tens of thousands of athletes, millions of athletes who are participating in an amateur sport, after work sport, after school sport, and so forth. And they bring him from one place to another, and you have these staged events. And Brundage comes away from the Soviet Union with this belief that sport in the Soviet Union is the true expression of amateur ideals. that Soviet citizens, from children to workers, students, and so forth, Soviet citizens participate in sport for simply the good of sport. They're not looking to earn money, to earn prize money, to win athletic scholarships.

28:34Bruce Berglund:This was one of the things that Brundage particularly hated, was this emerging system of athletic scholarships in American university sport. they're simply participating in sport for their health, to help build community and build society. And so Brundage, after his return, he writes an article in what was the most popular magazine in the United States at the time, the Saturday Evening Post, praising the Soviet sport system as a model of amateur sport. And he does say the United States should follow what in the Soviet Union. He makes this point of American sport is too dedicated to profit, to athletes getting paid, and as he said, to spectators who are just sitting in the stands watching events rather than participating in events.

29:25Bruce Berglund:And Brundage came away from his trip to the Soviet Union with this idea that the Soviets were indeed amateurs in their participation. Moreover, he comes away with something of a partnership with Soviet sports authorities. Soviet sports authorities recognized what Brundage hated was Western-style professional sport, what you saw in European football, what you saw in American sport. Brundage hated the system of scholarships in American university sport. And they joined him in condemning these varieties of sport and looking to root out any threat to amateurism that came from Western professionalism, while at the same time they were building up this system of Soviet state professionalism, which allowed their athletes to be paid.

30:14Cold War Conversations:The other countries who are competing against the Soviets, are they suspecting that everything is not right here? This isn't a level playing field?

30:24Bruce Berglund:Absolutely. Absolutely. So in the archive collections of Avery Brundage, I found letters, newspaper clippings that sport officials, sports journalists in different countries were sending to Brundage. There are letters from Europeans, Americans, Canadians who traveled to the Soviet Union and they gained a firsthand view, right? They didn't get the wool pulled over their eyes. They saw Soviet sport for what it was. And they would report on what they saw coming back. There were already in the 1950s athletes who were not from the Soviet Union, but athletes from the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, the satellite states, who were defecting to the West.

31:16Bruce Berglund:And they were reporting because when the Soviets moved into the Eastern European states after the war. These states also adopted this Soviet-style system of state professionalism. All of this information is in Brundage's files. He was aware of journalist reports. He was aware of these reports from athletes who had defected. He was aware of these complaints from officials in sport. And he would, and he did this on his tour he made, And he presented a file of information to Nikolai Romanov and asked Romanov, what about this? What about all these reports we have that your athletes are being paid?

31:57Bruce Berglund:And Romanov denied it, denied it. And throughout the years that followed, Brundage continued to send letters to Moscow to the Soviet Olympic Committee saying, we have these complaints that your athletes are not truly amateur. What do you say about this? and the soviets would stall the soviets would deflect and ultimately the soviets would say no we've said they're amateurs they're amateurs and i talk about in the book how this reaches a point in the case of international hockey for instance where canada the country that's had founded ice hockey canada leaves international hockey in the early 1970s because they recognize in terms of at the Olympics, and I should say as well, in other international competitions, they followed the International Olympic Committee's rules on amateurism.

32:55Bruce Berglund:So in hockey, for instance, the annual world championships, teams had to follow these amateur rules. And the Canadians say, we can't compete against the Soviets. The Soviets spend more time training in hockey than explicit professionals who play in the National Hockey League in North America. So this is unfair. We want to change. The IOC doesn't allow us. So we're pulling ourselves out of the Olympics. Sweden as well pulled out of the Olympics. They realized they couldn't compete and the IOC wouldn't force the Soviets to follow the rules. So yes, this is something that sport officials in other countries are well aware of, that Soviet athletes were being paid to train year-round.

33:36Cold War Conversations:And whilst Canada and Sweden had pulled out of ice hockey, the US remain in, and there's that iconic match in 1980, the miracle on the ice. Now, I'm not a big hockey fan, but I've heard of it. Can you explain the significance of this?

33:55Bruce Berglund:So this is the, how to say, This is my greatest sport memory as a child. So I grew up in the state of Minnesota, which as many of your listeners know, is a frozen, ice bound, far northern state. And hockey is very popular there. And as a boy, I was playing hockey. and so I have wonderful memories of listening to this match live on the radio with my father and he and I we just couldn't believe as we were listening to the game that the United States could beat the Soviet Union and and it was the case and I talk about this in in in the book the American hockey team that won and the Olympics that year were at Lake Placid New York the American hockey team that won this was a genuinely amateur team the players had come directly from their university teams.

34:49Bruce Berglund:They received just a bare stipend during the months that they were preparing for the match. They were together as a team for a matter of months, whereas the Soviet team had been together. The national team, many of its members had been playing together for a decade. The Soviet national team in hockey was constructed in a way that all of the players on the national team played on the same club team in the domestic Soviet league. So they would play a full season in the Soviet domestic league, and then they would go to the Olympics or to the world championships. Already, they were a finely tuned machine and they were playing under the club coach was also the coach of the national team.

35:36Bruce Berglund:So you had this unit that had been playing together not only for the entire season, but they'd been playing together for years. And they were professionals, right? They were being paid to train year round and they, and hockey players trained for 11 months. They had one month off. And this was the team that these American amateurs played. So it was miraculous. This is no miracle on ice. It was a miraculous victory in that you had a team of genuine amateurs. It was a young group of players against the Soviet professional, professional veterans. So yeah, it was remarkable. And like I said, it remains one of my favorite sport memories.

36:18Cold War Conversations:And how did the Soviets consider that the U.S. had managed to create that win?

36:27Bruce Berglund:So there are a few documentaries that have been done by American media about the Soviet players' experience, the Russian players' experience of the miracle on ice. And these were done for the anniversary of the Miracle on Ice. They interviewed former players. And what these former players typically say when they're speaking to American media is that their coach, a man named Viktor Tikhanov, that he was just a ruthless tyrant who trained the players so hard that they were physically, mentally, emotionally exhausted. it. And then moreover, during the match itself against the Americans, Tichonov made a number of strategic blunders that caused the Soviets to lose.

37:16Bruce Berglund:So this is the explanation that's given to American media. When former members of the Soviet team speak to Russian media, they give a completely different story. When they're speaking to Russian media, they say the Americans were doping. This is the only way that this team of 20-year-old university students could have competed for the full game against us, against the best team in the world, and won. And as one Soviet player said, I saw it in their eyes during the game that they were doped up. And this is the excuse that Tikhanov himself made to explain why his team lost in 1980, is this idea that the Americans were using doping, when in fact the Soviet hockey team had been using drugs in the past.

38:06Bruce Berglund:In particular, we have it on record from one of the Soviet sports physicians that in the 1979 World Championships, the Soviet team had been using drugs.

38:17Cold War Conversations:Which brings us on to that subject which most people look at as far as Eastern European competition is concerned during the Cold War. And Western countries were using doping as well. It wasn't solely a Soviet or East German thing. But when do the Soviets first look at using doping and how do they research it?

38:43Bruce Berglund:Right from the start of the Soviets' preparations for international sport for the Olympics, as these athletes are training, they're preparing for the Helsinki games. There are reports from the Soviet archives of physicians giving, they were called nutritional supplements. They were called various enhancing medicines, things like this. So already from 1954, Soviet physicians, coaches are providing some type of, some type of pharmaceuticals to their athletes. Now, this is before steroids. So steroids enter the picture really in the late 1950s. And the point you made that there were athletes in other countries who were using steroids, this is correct.

39:32Bruce Berglund:And this is something the Soviets used as an excuse to justify their use of steroids with their athletes. And so steroids really began in the late 1950s. And one of the key figures in bringing about the development of steroids is an American physician and researcher who, and I tell the story in the book, he was at the 1954 weightlifting championships in Vienna. He was the team physician for the Americans and he was having drinks with the Soviet team physician and the Soviet team physician is pressing him over drinks. What do you give your boys? What are you providing to your boys? And it comes out in the conversation that the a Soviet physician was giving the Soviet weightlifters injections of testosterone.

40:18Bruce Berglund:And so this American physician, whose name was John Ziegler, he goes back to the States, and he was a weightlifter himself. He starts experimenting with injections of testosterone, and he finds that's not very effective. But at the same time, he had been working with a pharmaceutical company on the development of anabolic steroids. And in particular, he also would treat burn patients. So he was working on the development of steroids and their use with burn patients. And he thought, how about we use this synthetic form of testosterone and use it with weightlifters? And he finds right away that this brings an increase in the amount of weight that lifters are able to put up.

41:05Bruce Berglund:And not only are they able to lift more, but they have more energy, they work out for longer. and he recognizes, aha. And Ziegler in later interviews, he would say, I recognized, he also had a Cold War mindset, right? We were in a competition with the Soviet Union. Therefore, I wanted to give our athletes whatever advantage we could.

41:26Cold War Conversations:Now, if you've listened this far, you must be enjoying the show. At least I hope you are. The reason I say this is on the Spotify app, you can now leave comments on individual episodes. so do me a favour and hit that pause button and leave a comment. It'd be great to hear from you and your interactions help push Cold War conversations up the Spotify rankings. Whatever you do, thanks very much for listening and now back to your episode. Hey, are you still there? That's great. Now, if you're enjoying the podcast and you listen via the Apple Podcasts app, you can leave a written review. Positive reviews really help me gain new listeners So hit that pause button and give me a five-star rating.

42:10Cold War Conversations:Thanks very much for listening.

42:13Bruce Berglund:Not only is our steroid use developing in the United States, but it's also developing in Western Europe and in the satellite states in Eastern Europe. So late 1950s, early 1960s, when athletes would gather together at international meets, they would be sharing pills. So at various athletics meets, the hammer throwers and the shot putters and the weightlifters, they're passing around pills. So the use of steroids begins to expand in the 1960s, especially by the late 60s. By the late 1960s, the Soviets recognize the use of these drugs is becoming more widespread, and they decide we need to investigate this.

42:58Bruce Berglund:And so there was a team physician, again, for the weightlifting team, a different person than in Vienna, whose name was Sergei Sarsanya. And Sarsanya, working with the Soviet weightlifting team, he decides to start a study through the Soviet Institute of Sport to find out the effectiveness of steroids. And they test steroids on athletes from basketball to biathlon, weightlifting, long distance runners. They were trying them on adult athletes as well as children. And they come up with this study, the results that's released in 1972. It's only a few copies were made available, which talks about the reasonable use of steroids as a way to gain advantage of.

43:40Bruce Berglund:And Sarsanya emphasizes this in the study. We are competing in athletic competitions within this heightened arena of international conflict. So Sarsanya recognized Soviet athletes compete within a political environment, a tense political environment. Therefore, Sarsanya argues, we need to use every scientific advantage we have for our athletes to be successful. And so the Soviets begin to emphasize the use of steroids, not just individual athletes. They begin to implement a system across different sports that comes from, we can say, from the top down, seeing this as a way for Soviet athletes to gain advantage.

44:31Bruce Berglund:And at the same time, and this brings us back to East Germany, right? They're watching athletes in the other satellite states using steroids and gaining advantages. And one of the things that comes up, one of the things I discuss in the book is how the Soviet system of distributing and using these steroids is somewhat haphazard, whereas the East Germans, they create a well-executed, designed, effective method of using steroids to bring athletic success. And that begins to heighten tensions in international sport between these two socialist states, the Soviet Union and East Germany.

45:15Cold War Conversations:It's incredible how East Germany and nothing on the Olympic scene and then from the 70s onwards just explode as this athletic superpower. And it is the drugs, but also I think they've also studied a lot more of the sports science as well. there's a scientific approach behind them. Yeah, it is the majority is the drugs there, but I think that there's a lot more investment in the sports science too.

45:45Bruce Berglund:Yeah, you're exactly right. And this is something in the course of my book, I talk about the contributions the Soviets have made to world sport. And one of the things they do, talked about women's sport earlier, but one of the other important things the Soviets bring to world sport is sports science and sports psychology. And this is something that gets carried from the Soviet Union to the East European satellite states. So you have already in the 1960s extensive studies that are being done on nutrition, on training, on development of young athletes by the institutes of sport research in the Soviet Union, as well as in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and other countries.

46:27Bruce Berglund:And I make the point is that this brings about a transformation of world sport that we still have today. This idea that if you mix science and research with athletic training, you are going to produce better athletes. And for spectators like us, we see better performances.

46:45Cold War Conversations:What steps is the IOC taking? Because they know about this explosion of pharmaceutical advantage being taken. Are they comfortable with it and just accept it as part of the picture and when do they actually take steps to try and prevent it?

47:04Bruce Berglund:So that's a good question. I should say as background, since the time of the Greeks, athletes have been coming up with different concoctions to give them an advantage in competition, right? So as long as there has been sport, there has been, there's been doping of some kind. So this is always something the IOC has been aware of. Initially, however, the IOC did not see this as threatening to athletes' health. Instead, it was a violation of the amateur code, right? So the IOC believed this notion that all athletes should participate in the spirit of sportsmanship and the spirit of fair play, and doping was a violation of that code.

47:47Bruce Berglund:And so the IOC, beginning in the 1960s, they began to make rules against doping, but they didn't yet have the science to engage in drug testing. And that doesn't really come about until the 1970s. And it's not until 1976 at the Montreal Summer Olympics that the IOC has a way of testing for the use of anabolic steroids. So meanwhile, the Soviets already, not only do you have Soviet scientists and physicians like Sarsania, not only are they trying to figure out what kinds of doses of which drugs give athletes the best performance, they're already thinking in terms of how do we have our athletes use these drugs and have them then pass the developing testing methods that the IOC is instituting.

48:48Bruce Berglund:For instance, I talk about the famous Soviet weightlifter of the 1970s, Vassily Alexiev, who listeners of my age will remember this just enormous bear of a man. He would wear these tiny red singlets. He had this big head of curly black hair, and he set record after record. He won Olympic gold medals throughout the 1970s. Strongest man in the world. He was just this feat of nature, this enormous man lifting enormous weights. He was also doped up on steroids. But Sarsania and others figured out ways for him to avoid detection. One of the early ways is that they would give him heavy doses of citric acid before he went through his doping tests, and that would wash the steroids out of his system.

49:34Bruce Berglund:So Alexeyev would brag after he had the years of competing that all of his opponents, they were all doping, they couldn't match him, and he never failed a drug test. And he never failed a drug test because the Soviets were a step ahead during the 1970s in figuring out ways to make sure that their athletes tested clean.

49:55Cold War Conversations:The doping gene becomes more stringent towards the 80s. So you've got the Moscow Olympics, which effectively the drug testing is controlled by the KGB or controlled by the Soviets there. But then you've got the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics where the boot is on the other foot.

50:14Bruce Berglund:Yes, exactly. So during this period, testing was managed. So this is in the time before the World Anti-Doping Agency. It's not until the 2002 Olympics that WADA takes over control of doping. Prior to this point, the host nation was responsible for the testing regimen. So at the Moscow games in 1980, the Soviet sport committee was responsible for doping testing. They handed the testing over to the KGB. And in this, they were following the model of the East Germans. The East Germans put their doping program under the control of the Stas, the East German secret police. So the KGB has control of the doping testing and athletes who would bring their vials of their urine for testing, the KGB would take it and they would give them a clean sample and say, this is your urine that you're going to hand in.

51:09Bruce Berglund:And as a result, at the end of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, every athlete, Soviet and non-Soviet, tested clean. And the Soviets were able to brag that we've had the cleanest, fairest Olympics in history. So four years later, 1984, at Los Angeles, U.S. organizers, they are preparing their testing regimen, and they put the testing in the hands of university researchers, university chemists, who have a lab established on site in Los Angeles. And Soviet sports officials are thinking, okay, so in Moscow, we could have our athletes doped to the gills and the KGB just threw out their urine. What are we going to do in the United States in 1984?

51:57Bruce Berglund:And I should say, and this is something I talk about in the book, is in the months leading up to even in early spring 1984, Soviet authorities plan to participate in the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. So in other words, you have the boycott by the Americans and others in 1980. In 1984, you have the boycott by the Soviets and other communist states. But the Soviet decision to boycott in 1984 wasn't simply a tit-for-tat reprisal against the Americans in 1980. The Soviets had planned to participate, but one of the things that concerned them was would they be able to compete? And they recognized that the use of performance enhancing drugs was so important to their athletes, they had to figure out a way for their athletes to test clean.

52:54Bruce Berglund:And the plan that the Soviets came up with, and this was just revealed in recent years by the New York Times, the plan the Soviets had was that they were going to bring a passenger ship, park it in Los Angeles Harbor. and they asked permission from U.S. authorities and Los Angeles authorities and they said, we just want to give our athletes a place where they can prepare, they can have their own meals, have their own trainers, physical trainers and so forth, and then they'll go off the ship and they'll go participate at the venues in Los Angeles. What they didn't say is that they were also going to have a testing lab on the ship in Los Angeles Harbor.

53:30Bruce Berglund:Their athletes would have their urine tested to verify that their urine was clean, and then the athletes would go compete and turn in their urine for the official testing. So the aim of the Soviets is they wanted to avoid the embarrassment of having any of their athletes end up with a positive test. So they wanted to make sure everybody was testing clean. And ultimately, the American authorities put so many restrictions on this ship parked in Los Angeles Harbor that the Soviets recognized this plan might not work. And that wasn't the only factor, but there were a variety of other factors. But this element with the inability for the Soviets to have their athletes doping and then testing clean, this we have to look at as one of the factors that causes the Soviets to back out of the 1984 Olympics.

54:23Bruce Berglund:And the decision to back out was made only in May 1984, a couple of months before the games.

54:28Cold War Conversations:I found that really interesting because most people think it was just the tit for tat, but it obviously a significant part of that decision was the worry of their athletes being caught. And I guess the East Germans must have been really worried about that as well because they were as reliant, if not more.

54:47Bruce Berglund:Not so much because the East German scientists were better than the Soviet scientists at enabling their athletes to test clean. And this was one of the, I mentioned earlier, the tensions between the Soviets and the East Germans. And one point of tension between these two socialist countries is that the East Germans were better at doping science. They were better at the drugs they were giving their athletes, and they were better at figuring out ways for their athletes to test clean. And so it was, actually, it was the East Germans who were calling on the International Olympic Committee to have drug testing be internationalized at the Olympics rather than the host country.

55:30Bruce Berglund:And this was before the 1980 Moscow Games. And Moscow authorities sent a strongly worded message to East Berlin saying, hey, you know, comrades, you need to back off because you don't want to harm the interests of the Soviet Union. So the East Germans did not have the same fear as the Soviets did of getting caught. And moreover, the success of the East Germans, this was another factor that the Soviets were considering as they were preparing for the 1984 Summer Games. The East Germans had become so strong in international competition that the Soviet sport authorities, they were fearing, okay, one, what is going to happen if we lose to the Americans in Los Angeles?

56:16Bruce Berglund:And what's going to happen if we lose to the East Germans at the Los Angeles Games? So this was the concern for Moscow is the fear that going to LA, they would not have the same success that they had been used to for the previous decades.

56:32Cold War Conversations:Wow. Wow. Incredible. There is lots more in the book. We've covered up to the Moscow and Los Angeles Olympics of 1980 and 1984, but the book does continue to the present day. Do you want to just give a bit more of a flavor as to what we are leaving on the table for people so they will undoubtedly rush out and buy the book?

56:58Bruce Berglund:Yeah. So the book is roughly half and half looking at the Soviet period and then the post-Soviet period. And the connecting thread is this idea, which I talked about at the top of the interview, this notion that Moscow leaders had this idea from the very beginning of their participation in international sport, that Russian athletes must win, that they must demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet system or the greatness of the Soviet state and now the Russian state. And this has led to now Russian sport authorities and political authorities engaging in various deceptions, engaging in various tactics to have their athletes gain an unfair advantage.

57:41Bruce Berglund:For instance, the major doping program that was revealed in 2015 and 2016. And of course, another connection between the two parts of the book, the Soviet and post-Soviet part, is the person of Vladimir Putin. Putin was 19 years old in 1972 when the Soviets were competing in Munich. As I talk about the book, as other people have talked about in the case of Putin, when he was a boy growing up in Leningrad, he was involved in judo. He saw sport. He saw judo as really important to building his character, as he said. But also it was important for just allowing him to defend himself in the rough neighborhood where he grew up.

58:20Bruce Berglund:And so sport has always been important to Putin. And that's continued throughout his presidency. He was right from his first year as president, he was actively involved in preparing athletes for the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, the Sochi Games that Russia hosted in 2014. This was really a project about Putin. Putin put his prestige and his legitimacy on the line to gain the Winter Games for Russia. And so sport, not just the Olympics, not just international sport, but also domestic sport, has been a central part of Putin's political program.

58:54Cold War Conversations:You have been listening to Bruce Berglund, the author of The Moscow Playbook, How Russia Used, Abused and Transformed Sports in the Hunt for Gold. There's links in the episode information for you to buy the book and support the podcast. The episode extras such as videos, photos and other content are available via a link in the episode information. The podcast wouldn't exist without the generous efforts of our financial supporters and I'd like to thank one and all of them for keeping the podcast on the road. The Cold War conversation continues in our Facebook discussion group. Just search for Cold War Conversations in Facebook.

59:36Cold War Conversations:Thanks very much for listening and look forward to seeing you next week.

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