Attempts to Establish a Central Physical Culture and Sport Publishing House in the 1920s

Section: History of Journalism

The article deals with an extremely confusing issue about the history of the formation of a centralized specialized publishing house for physical culture and sport during the 1920s, which has not been practically raised so far in Russian and foreign research literature. Such a publishing house was necessary for the leadership of Soviet physical education as one of the main tools for organizational and outreach activities, designed to direct the lives of millions of athletes in the direction necessary for the state. The article is aimed at destroying the widely accepted but erroneous opinion that only the history of the Physical Culture and Sport publishing house established in 1923 deserves scholarly attention. On the basis of archival documents, many of which are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, the article examines a whole sequence of emergence and termination of a number of publishing projects created under the auspices of various organizations which headed Soviet physical education. The author used the documents containing information about the work of these organizations and their interaction with publishing agencies, which are stored in the funds of the state archives GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation) and RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History). Also used were publications from sports periodicals published in the 1920s. The author set himself the goal of recreating the chronology of the publishing process in the field of sports up to the emergence of the Joint-Stock Publishing Company “Physical Culture and Sport” and to analyze a complex set of factors that influenced the operation of this and other publishing houses.

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To cite this article: Alekseev K.A. (2022) Popytki sozdaniya tsentral'nogo izdatel'stva po fizkul'ture i sportu v 1920-e gg. [Attempts to Establish a Central Physical Culture and Sport Publishing House in the 1920s]. Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta. Seriya 10. Zhurnalistika 5: 3–31. DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.5.2022.331