Article

Abstract

This article argues that the success of the 1980 Summer Olympics was a result of cooperation between local elites. It will open a new perspective on the imbalances in the Olympic project, which was an effort of the entire USSR, not just the host city Moscow. This article will analyze the project as it was planned and prepared in Moscow and then examine how the Soviet state functioned as a centralizing authority that paternalistically distributed responsibility to the other republics. The “triangular relationship” between the center, Moscow, and the Olympic peripheries, Tallinn and Kyiv, implies that the USSR involved its different nationalities in the preparation process, but still, the all-union organizational structure contradicted the Olympic principle of a centralized Games in a single Olympic stadium. The centripetal communication with the republics constituted one of the main stabilizing instruments of imperial structures in the Olympic project.