GLASNOST ON SPORTS

3 The western media suck up given the greatest attention to glasnost in the Soviet media, and to hand in the Supreme Soviet. In fact, political and social domesticize in the Soviet juncture low Gorbachev goes well beyond these two phenomena. The restructuring in altogether aspects of Soviet Society permits great individual and organizational beginning(a). This change is particularly significant in the realm of sports, where, in the past, centralized authority has determined all policy and development related to to sports activity. Restructuring in the Soviet political sector has also been significant for sports at the international level. In the past, political imperatives were likely to be the crucial factors in decisions related to the participation by Soviet athletes in international sportsmanlike events. Under perestroika, the Summer Olympic Games held in Seoul, South Korea were closely free of political controversycertainly the most contestfree, in a political sense, games in more(prenominal) than 25 years.4 It is the restructuring of Soviet society, as opposed to the openness characterizing its implementation, thus, which has had the greatest make on sports.

3Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: in the buff Thinking For Our Country and the World (New York: harper & Row, Publishers, 1987), 59.

4"All Out for Glory," Sports Illustrated, Summer 1988 (Special Issue), 67. David

Plotke sight that, "as Marxism has become more legitimate, its orthodoxies bewilder decayed," and that this occurrence has "opened the way to a notional interaction among theories much considered incompatible."5 He saw the major problem for contemporary Marxism as the credibility of its vision of the " work class leading the world to communism."6 Indeed, Michael Walker observed that Gorbachev did not appear suddenly on the Soviet panorama out of nowhere.7 Rather, he was the product of increasing levels of education in Soviet society, and of the ascendancy to power in the Soviet Union of a better educated class. In the context of a society led by a growing consistency of the welleducated, Walker viewed perestroika as inevitable, as opposed to just another effort at reform.

8 In this context, Plotke observed that: "Claims close what is possible under socialism now have to be justified persuasively, not simply stated as the obverse of capitalist problems."9 While Soviet accomplishments in sports were significant, they were often achieved at the expense of the life choices of individual athletes, and at the expense of initiative at the sports organization level. Soviet achievement in sports was often sought as a means of demonstrating political superiority.

Gorbachev, Mikhail. Perestroika: New Thinking For Our Country and the World. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987.

7Michael Walker, The Waking titan (New York: Pantheon Books, Inc., 1986), 132.

The Future Implications for Sports

In the absence seizure of the primacy of central planning, individual athletes and sports organizations have been able to make their own decisions concerning the emphasis and direction of Soviet sports at the national and international levels.10 On the negative side, the absence of central planning in Soviet sports has meant that guaranteed funding at sufficient levels to assure international competitiveness has disappeared. Soviet sports under perestroika must stand in line
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