With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Michael Averko: Cherry Picking The Soviet Past And Russian Present

Michael Averko is a New York based independent foreign policy analyst and media critic.

The July 12, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) photo gallery of some past Olympians emphasizes an exclusive non-Russian categorizing of selected Soviet athletes – something noteworthy, given the high degree of Russian athletic participation and success in Soviet era sports. The RFE/RL photo gallery serves as evidence that the Soviet legacy was not just about Russia and Russians.

In this exhibit, Russian Sergei Belov is referred to as a “Soviet basketball great” and “Moscow resident”, unlike the other featured Soviet athletes, who are identified by the origin of their given non-Russian republic. Along with “Soviet”, the category of “Moscow resident” is not necessarily synonymous with a Russian identity. (For quite sometime, Moscow has had a considerable multiethnic dynamic.) Nevertheless, Soviet and derivatives of Moscow (like “Moskal”) have been periodically used by some anti-Russian leaning elements as interchangeable equivalents for describing Russians in general.

Read entire article at Eurasia Review