Vse na lyzhi! The Culture of Skiing in Russia and the Development of Soviet Biathlon---1888 to 1991

Nowhere in the world was the sport of biathlon, a combination of cross-country skiing and rifle marksmanship, taken more seriously than in the Soviet Union, and no other nation garnered greater success in international competition. From the introduction of modern biathlon as an international sport in 1958 to the USSR's demise in 1991, Russians won 32 percent of all possible medals awarded in world championship and Olympic competition. The closest competitor was Norway, whose national team gathered a distant 15 percent over the same period of time. So dominant were the biathletes of the USSR that their victory was often a foregone conclusion at major events such as the Olympics. Yet it was more than sheer technical skill that created Soviet hegemony in biathlon. The sport was bound to the Soviet Union's culture, educational system and historical experience and provided the perfect ideological platform to promote the state's socialist system and military might, imbuing the sport with a Cold War sensibility that transcended the government's primary quest for postwar success at the Olympics. How the USSR interpreted the sport of skiing within a variety of cultural, ideological, political and social contexts throughout the course of seven decades is the primary focus of this dissertation. It attempts to answer why success in cross-country ski racing and biathlon at the international level was so crucial to Soviet sport policy, a subordinate yet consistently integral part of the polity's cultural and political construct. Although biathlon was among the tiniest of sporting subsets in the latter half of the twentieth century, it nevertheless reflected many of the Soviet culture's broader concepts in its reductive concision: ideological, historical and artistic. From a different perspective altogether, though, this miniscule piece of the Soviet project looms large in the history of global sport: it is impossible to write about biathlon, currently the most popular winter spectator sport in Europe, without considering the significant influence of the USSR. In the beginning, the Soviet Union owned biathlon, and so are the stories of both the state and the event inseparably conjoined.