“Physical Culture and Sport Will Become Part and Parcel of Everyday Life”: Khrushchev’s Communist Sports in Central Asia’s Uzbekistan, 1953 to 1964

Abstract

Lenin commenced Soviet physical culture and sports during the mid-1920s, and Stalin organised it significantly during the 1930s and 1940s. It was part of Stalin’s Cultural Revolution and the implementation of Soviet modernity. This qualitative and quantitative research paper investigates physical culture and sports 33 years after its founding when Khrushchev was the communist leader (1953 to 1964). The geographic focus is on the Central Asian republic with the largest population and emerging urbanisation: Uzbekistan. The paper explores the extent of Khrushchev’s physical culture and sports development in that country. It is a topic with little published research in English. Using select English language secondary sources from the West and the former Soviet Union, the major research question asks (i) What were Khrushchev's output and impact on physical culture and sport in Uzbekistan? In support is the minor research question: (ii) What were the numbers of male and female sportspeople, and what type of urban sports sites opened? Overall, the paper highlights that an authoritarian communist regime was increasingly successful in developing modern physical culture and sports in the majority Muslim Turkic and Persian regions, primarily in the cities.