Everyone to Skis!: Skiing in Russia and the Rise of Soviet Biathlon

1—Long Boards in the Long Nineteenth Century

One Long Boards in the Long Nineteenth Century L ess t h an a year before the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd , Vladimir Lenin offered this revolutionary advice to his mistress and fellow conspirator, the French socialist-feminist Inessa Armand: “Do you ski? Do it without fail! Learn how and set off for the mountains—you must. In the mountains winter is wonderful! It’s sheer delight, and it smells like Russia.”1 It is no surprise that Lenin was enthusiastic about skiing. His short life span of fifty-four years coincided with that of Norwegian scientist and explorer Fridtjof Nansen, widely acknowledged for introducing modern skiing to the world. Lenin, who was born in 1870, was a teenager when Nansen completed his groundbreaking ski traverse of Greenland in 1888, and a young man when the Norwegian adventurer returned from the Arctic after an epic three-year exploratory voyage in 1896. Even Russia’s iconic revolutionary was not immune to “Nansen-mania,” a pan-European enthusiasm that swept the continent at the turn of the century and remained well into the inter-war period. That the architect of the Soviet project fused skiing with the essence of his homeland suggests the importance of this new sport to Russia during the nationalistic frenzy of late nineteenth-century Europe. His words foreshadow as well how Soviets would transform a sport that had essentially been a peasant pastime prior to Nansen’s landmark trek into an embodiment of the national character, finding in skiing an anti-bourgeois mixture of militarism, Arctic heroism, scientific inquiry and socialist ideology. Skiing developed as a modern sport between 1789 and 1914, a period Eric Hobsbawm has termed “the long nineteenth century.” Historian Norman Davies defines this epoch in terms of power: technical, economic, cultural and intercontinental.2 To gain control of these power matrices, European nations engaged in intense rivalries aggravated by diplomatic maneuvering, military development and colonial competition from the 14 EVERYONE TO SKIS! mid-1800s to the outbreak of World War I. Just as critical was the power of ideology, whose manifestations helped shape nineteenth-century Europe ’s geopolitical landscape. Arguably the most virulent and potent of these doctrines was nationalism, a term used to convey the idea that the optimal social system is one that divides people into nationalities having cultural and political autonomy or, preferably, independence.3 From the very first stirrings of the romantic movement at the threshold of the nineteenth century to Franz Ferdinand’s assassination at the hands of a Serbian nationalist in 1914, nationalism swept over Europe as activists strove to inculcate varying degrees of national consciousness among diverse groups across the continent. Language and culture, not citizenship in a particular state, became the determining factors of an individual’s nationality.4 In order to establish the legitimacy of a particular nationality, nationalist intellectuals scoured history to furnish proof of a nation’s separate and unique identity. Prehistoric artifacts and medieval sources were given especial credence because they established long-standing claims to nationhood . Peasant folklore was also highly valued as a living connection that joined the modern nation with its most ancient cultural roots. Interest in philology, medieval history, national literature and ethnology blossomed in the nineteenth century as ardent nationalists ransacked these sources for the glorification of their own people’s achievements and cultural superiority . Wagnerian opera and the collected fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm in the German states, Serbo-Croatian studies in the Balkans and the Kalevala in Finland are just a few examples of this trend: for Norwegians , skiing was the primary cultural signifier conflating peasant roots joined to a mythical past with connotations of nationhood. Skiing: An Ancient Solution to Winter’s Problems In regions close to the Arctic Circle or located at high elevation, skiing was often a tool of survival for people with no other means of winter transportation . Attempts to pinpoint the precise location where skiing began have inspired fierce and competing claims: a blatantly nationalist point of view has infused the study of early ski artifacts, especially among the ethnological scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although intensive lobbying by Sweden and especially Norway in the twentieth century has conveyed the notion that skiing began in Scandinavia, Russia certainly could make a similar claim. Suffice it to say that sporadic Long Boards in the Long Nineteenth Century 15 archaeological finds indicate that skiing developed...