SPORT 1913 - 2013

part two_CHAPTER 6

cratic Party (Bericht über den IV. Kongress zu Helsingfors, 51). Just in 1927 Social Democrats had succeeded to beat the Communists by a very narrow majority in the voting for repre- sentatives to the fourth union meeting of the TUL. Both parts had drawn on very question- able methods in the election campaign (Hen- tilä 1982, 201–206). In August 1928, the RSI decided to organ- ise the first World Spartakiad in Moscow as a counterpart to theWorkers Olympic Games and also invited the LSI/SASI member unions to participate. The Helsinki conference of the LSI/ SASI 1927 answered the invitation by declaring the Spartakiad as a pure Communist sport event and forbade the members of the LSI/SASI to participate. (Bericht über den IV. Kongress zu Helsingfors, 51–52) The Communist opposi- tion defied this decision and sent their athletes to Moscow. The teams from Finland and Ger- many were particularly strong. The national unions had no other way than to expel the ath- letes who had travelled to Moscow. If the local sport clubs refused to discharge their members, the unions had to set apart the whole club, etc. The so-called Spartakiad dispute caused a chain reaction in the TUL in 1928–1929 which result- ed in the dismissal of 14 000 members, which meant around 40 per cent of the whole mem- bership of the union. The Social Democratic leadership succeeded, however, to patch the losses by an active recruitment of new mem- bers (Hentilä 1982, 209–240). After being expelled from the TUL, many of the young top athletes joined bourgeois

sport clubs and won gold medals for Finland in the IOC Olympic Games in 1932 and 1936. Perhaps the most famous of them is the male athlete Volmari Iso-Hollo, a winner of the Spartakiad inMoscow as well as the gold med- al in Los Angeles and Berlin in 3 000 meters steeplechase. Another country in which the political split in the worker sport movement was very bitter was Germany. The Communist opposi- tion was especially strong in Berlin and in some industrial areas like Saxony and Ruhr. When the opposition was organised as Kamp- fgemeinschaft für Rote Sporteinheit – Fight- ing Community for the Red Unity of Sport – it counted ca. 100 000 members. This was eight per cent of the total membership of German labour sport unions. However, the opposition was politically very important because its aim was to put the sport policies of the Comintern into practice. Indeed, it was not a coincidence when the Finnish Communist sport opposi- tion named its organisation in December 1929 as Committee for the Unification of Workers Sport (Työläisurheilun yhtenäisyyskomitea, TYK) (Hentilä 1982, 254). The German “Gemeinschaft” as well as the Finnish Unification Committee worked as central unions of the communist sport clubs organising national and even international sport events. The new tactics of the Comin- tern launched in the sixth conference in 1928 were crystallised in the phrase “Unity”. Ac- cording to the new tactics, cooperation with Social Democrats was impossible because they

had in fact turned into allies of the Fascists, “Social-fascists”. Therefore the Communist movement had to establish the “Unity” of the working class alone from below. In Finland the new tactics of the Comintern failed and led to isolation of the Communist leadership from the masses. In 1930 the Communist movement was illegalised by a new law and as much as 157 sport clubs were dissolved by the court. A part of the Communist leadership was imprisoned while another part succeeded to flee to the Soviet Union (Hentilä 1982, 325– 328). In spite of strong political pressure from the right wing, the TUL was able to survive under Social Democratic leadership and con- tinue its work through the hard years of de- pression and political reaction during the 1930’s. When the worldwide depression broke out and caused an unemployment which grew into millions, the international worker sport move- ment was weak and split. The seizure of power by National Socialist in Germany in January 1933 was fateful to worker sport, too – and not only in Germany. By the end of the 1930’s the international worker sport movement andmost of the national unions were completely de- stroyed (Bernett 1982, 349–373). From themem- ber unions of the LSI/SASI only the SATUS of Switzerland and the TUL in Finland remained untouched through the Second World War. With the demise of its strongest member unions in Germany, Austria and Czechoslova- kia, the Social Democrats continued interna- tional co-operation even after 1933. From 1934,

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