Behind the Sports Scenes: Non-Competitional Practices of Sports Diplomacyof the Soviet Union in the 1920s

Based on the documents from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, the article provides a complete analysis of the non-competitive practices and tools of sports diplomacy employed by the Soviet Union in the 1920s. The primary focus is on the business correspondence between the Red Sports International, the Supreme Council of Physical Culture of the USSR and their foreign sections, revealing that cooperation in sports extended far beyond mere competition. These interactions included logistical efforts (such as purchasing equip-ment), organizational and methodological support (training foreign athletes using Soviet patterns, inviting for-eign instructors to the USSR, and exchanging specialized literature), and medical assistance (recruiting foreign specialists to the State Institute of Physiatry and Orthopedics and arranging overseas treatments for athletes). Under the pretext of sporting needs, visits were also conducted that can be characterized as technological recon-naissance: Soviet officials toured to European engine factories with the intention of replicating similar produc-tion facilities in the USSR. Despite persistent appeals from Sportintern leaders to restrict sports diplomacy ex-clusively to contacts with proletarian cells, this practice was actively and willingly involved in interaction with foreign “bourgeois” sports when it served practical purposes, such as raising the standards of Soviet physical education, or ensuring more productive networks. Thus, sports diplomacy in the first decade of its existence can be described as an adaptable practice, the effectiveness of which often superseded ideological constraints.