Sportintern

Origins and character

Sportintern emerged from the split of the international socialist movement into social-democratic and communist camps after World War I and the Russian Revolution. Social democrats founded an International Association for Sports and Physical Culture in 1920, renamed the Socialist Workers' Sport International in 1925, and the workers' sports movement divided along the same lines (P4, P5, P6).

Sportintern was conceived as a proletarian alternative both to the International Olympic Committee and to the social-democratic International (P69, P73). Its founding was not a Comintern project but an independent initiative. Nikolai Podvoisky, who directed Soviet Russia's military training organization, discussed with delegates from around the world at the 2nd World Congress of the Comintern in the summer of 1920 the idea of an organization to coordinate the physical training of youth. He then gathered interested delegates already in Moscow and the group constituted itself a founding conference, while the Comintern was preoccupied with other affairs (P8, P9).

Sources differ on the date. Russian Wikipedia, drawing on a Soviet-era physical culture dictionary, states that it was founded in Moscow on 23 July 1921 (P73); English Wikipedia gives only July 1921 (P1). A belatedly published record of the July 1921 conference in Internationale Jugend-Korrespondenz, dated 1 April 1922, reports that a founding conference of about 20 Communists met in Moscow on 23 June 1921 (P65).

Organization and relations with the Comintern

The founding conference issued a public manifesto declaring the establishment of a Red Sport International and elected a governing Executive Committee with representatives from Soviet Russia, Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, Sweden, Italy, and Alsace-Lorraine, with Podvoisky as President (P9). Because no official Soviet sport organizations existed at the time while Germany had a well-developed workers' sport movement, Sportintern from its outset maintained a strong German flavor and held its 2nd Conference in Berlin in July 1922 (P10).

The Comintern moved closer to Sportintern in November 1922, when, in conjunction with the 4th World Congress, its Executive Committee decided to name a representative to the "independent" proletarian sport organization. The Communist International of Youth (KIM) followed only at its Bureau meeting in Moscow in July 1923, with a general recommendation of support for Sportintern and its affiliates as a useful "proletarian class instrument" (P11). The Sportintern Executive Committee met in Moscow in February 1923 and decided to establish a satellite bureau in Berlin to increase participation among Western European workers' sports organizations; the move helped trigger a split of the French Workers Sports Federation, with 80% of its membership affiliating to the RSI (P12). At its 3rd Congress in Moscow in October 1924 the organization enlarged its Executive Committee to include four members of the KIM executive, which saw Sportintern's national affiliates as overwhelmingly young workers and sought influence within it (P14).

Membership was formally "open to all proletarian elements which recognize the class struggle", so Sportintern was not an explicitly communist organization, a shortcoming in KIM's eyes (P14). In 1924–1925 the RSI effectively became an auxiliary of the Comintern, with control exercised through KIM (P19). Podvoisky himself argued for ideological hegemony: in a speech to the 5th Enlarged Plenum of the Comintern in spring 1925 he urged that Sportintern adopt the motto of converting sport and gymnastics into a weapon of the class revolutionary struggle (P16, P17). French sports historian André Gounot judged that the RSI's dependence on the Comintern was accompanied by the Soviet section's dominance and that Soviet interests were decisive in its decisions (P21).

The last International Congress of the RSI came in 1928. It involved no serious discussion of contemporary sporting issues but a mechanical attempt to apply the Comintern's ultra-radical Third Period line of "Class versus Class" and the theory of social fascism to world sport, widening the fissure between the two camps of the European workers' sport movement (P22).

Social composition

Membership was not monolithic. According to the RSI's own study, members were predominantly male but came from communist, socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist tendencies as well as from no party at all, including white collar employees, students, and government workers alongside workers. Records of the French section indicate that about 80% of participants were from the working class and 20% from other social groups (P24, P37). No exact figures exist for Communist Party membership in any national section, but the Czechoslovak federation, thought to have the largest Communist contingent outside the USSR, is estimated at 20 to 30% Communist Party members (P25, P38). Participation by members of other parties or of none testifies to the limited impact of RSI rhetoric at the grassroots; one scholar called the RSI a "split organization, living in two universes", bureaucratic in political discourse yet within the milder social-democratic workers' sports tradition at club level (P26, P39).

Spartakiads and dissolution

Socialist and communist workers' sports bodies objected to the Olympics' competition between nations as national chauvinism and criticized its rigid entrance standards and the privileged class background of its athletes (P41, P42). The RSI accordingly staged workers' sports festivals called Spartakiads, named for Spartacus, against the IOC Games: English Wikipedia records two held in 1928 and one each in 1931 and 1937 (P43), while Russian Wikipedia records three summer and one winter Spartakiads (P75).

From the middle 1930s the Popular Front line made joint festivals with socialists the tactical order of the day. The RSI and the Socialist Workers' Sport International planned a 3rd Workers' Olympiad in Barcelona in June 1936, postponed because of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and rescheduled for Antwerp the following summer (P45). It attracted 27,000 participating athletes and 50,000 spectators on the final day, with about 200,000 people at the closing parade (P46).

In the first months of 1937, as the Soviet Union was immersed in the secret police campaign remembered as the Great Terror, the Comintern dissolved the Red Sport International in April of that year (P48, P78).

Chairmen

Nikolai Podvoisky, one of the organizers of the October Revolution in Russia and deputy chairman of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee, was chairman from 1921 to 1927 (P76, P80). Russian Wikipedia adds that Mikhail Kedrov chaired from 1926 to 1931, and Ivan Zholdak from 1931 (P81, P82).